“And if I don’t do it?”
“Don’t push me, Jack, I warn you...”
Giles’s frown softened, and he wiped a hand across his forehead. “I’m sorry. Believe me, I don’t like to burst your bubble mate, but the bottom line is there’s simply no time for exploring rumours and conspiracy theories. We’re up against a deadline, and I’m at my wits’ end. The competition are bringing out a similar book within a few weeks and we have simply got to beat them to it. What’s more, Asda have put in a big order if we can get it out on time, but that order is wholly dependent on us beating the other publisher’s book. Between you and me, Figaro’s profits this year are way down, so the board are hinting at redundancies. If I don’t deliver Crash and Burn to the design guys within the next couple of weeks, your friend Ken might not be the only one who gets his cards. You see how important it is to me for you to make the right decision?”
After leaving Figaro Publications I joined the crowds on Kingsway, walking towards the underground station. To be fair to Giles, there were certainly issues about my discovery. Was the photograph genuine? If it was, who were the men who were doing the firing, and could they be identified as murderers? If a murder enquiry, 28 years on, had to be instigated, would it mean nothing could be printed about the case because it would be sub judice before any possible legal proceedings? And what were the chances that the killers, or anyone who might have employed them, were still traceable or even alive?
As for Lennon’s murder, any different versions from the official ones of the event would simply join the jumble of patently ludicrous conspiracy theories already in existence.
Maggi O’Kane had a daughter, Shelly, and I wanted to talk to her about what I’d discovered; of course she’d have probably been barely four when she died, so was unlikely to have any knowledge of events, but I felt she was owed the truth. Luckily the Wetherspoon pub I went into had WiFi, and using my laptop to trace her turned out to be easier than I’d expected. A Google search had found a Guardian newspaper article, dated ten years ago, about a Shelly O’Kane, a talented young artist whose rock-star mother had killed herself after killing her partner and remaining band members. The tone of the short feature was ‘survival against the odds’ with accounts of how the orphaned only-child had tried to put her past behind her, overcoming her ‘awful’ legacy from a homicidally insane mother. Higher up on the Google list was Shelly O’Kane’s name included in an art exhibition that was running in London, and the last day was today. Ms O’Kane was taking part in an exhibition entitled ‘Awaiting the Dawn’ that was being held at a gallery in South London until tonight.
I had lunch then made my way there. St Mary’s Arts Centre in Battersea had once been a large church, and now it was one of those bustling friendly buildings adapted for community use that can never quite outgrow their ecclesiastical origins. I went through the arched stone doorway and paid my two-pound entry fee to an eager looking bespectacled lady sitting at a table, who gave me a sheet of paper that had the numbered exhibits listed on one side, accompanied by prices and artists’ names.
The main gallery was large and rectangular with white walls and handfuls of visitors ambling aimlessly across the stone-flagged floor, their demeanour more of bored time-wasters than those who were intent on making purchases. The hype for the exhibition had promised a far more upmarket venue, a grander, chicer, more stylish gallery altogether. This first room housed mainly sculpture, and the first exhibit took the form of a large tray filled with water, simulated waves pulsing the surface regularly. Floating on the surface were a number of pink plastic cones, apparently miniature representations of women’s breasts. There was a bronze item on a plinth, a likeness of a bull with a man’s bearded head, as well as some strange cylindrical pointed bronze lozenges, which were meant to look like giant bullets, whose enigmatic title was Firing Blanks.
The adjacent room’s offerings were mostly paintings, illuminated by the wall spotlights and the daylight streaming through the high up stained-glass windows. They were still-lifes, largely bowls of fruit, plus some seascapes and portraits, and a number of nude studies. I scanned the list and saw that Shelly O’Kane’s work was supposed to be in this room, but when I looked, I couldn’t see any with signatures that looked like Shelly O’Kane. But on the far wall I struck lucky. There was a large gold-framed portrait of a portly middle-aged man in a dinner jacket holding a cigar and a balloon glass, and a signature on the bottom right corner Shelly OK. It was a vivid, lively oil painting, with bright striking colours and tones. Further along I found some abstracts with the same signature: geometric shapes and patterns that meant very little to me. There was also a single charcoal sketch that looked somehow out of place in these calm restful surroundings. It was of a woman’s head, a rabid terror in her eyes, hair in a disordered canopy over a skull-like face, mouth open as if in either a silent scream or orgasmic delight. I shivered and looked away, reminded of Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream. An unwelcome phrase leapt into my thoughts as I looked at it: the product of a sick mind.
From the corner of my eye I caught sight of a woman entering the room and watching me. She had style: red loose-sleeved top, tight hipster jeans, and a curtain of dark hair that fell to her shoulders. As I turned to meet her gaze, she half smiled. Much later, I tried to recapture that moment when I first walked across to meet her, tried to remember the curve of her lips, the angle of her high heel against the grey stone floor and her sweet tangy perfume, a freshness that surrounded her. She was so much like her mother I almost gasped. Maybe it was bizarre and ridiculous, I don’t know, but I think it was at that point that I began to fall in love with her.
But oddly enough, the glitzy clothes had cloaked a disappointment. From a distance you expected her mother’s glamour but close up Shelly O’Kane’s face could best be described as homely: despite the generous mouth and large expressive eyes, she hadn’t got that indefinable charisma that Maggi O’Kane had had in abundance. No way was she beautiful or even particularly striking, yet somehow, with the afternoon sunshine streaking across her face, I thought that there was something quite fascinating about her. What surprised me most about her face was the birthmark, a round wheal on her cheek about an inch in diameter. Make-up had disguised it, but it hovered there, a marred ugly contrast to the otherwise flawless complexion, half covered by the chestnut hair that brushed her face. The shock of seeing Maggi ‘born again’ was a cruel illusion. It was like when you see a stranger you think you recognise until you get right up close and realise that the resemblance was a weird optical illusion caused by distance: there for a second then gone forever. There were similarities to Maggi, certainly, for instance the way she tilted her head that I’d noticed in an old video, and an expression I thought I’d seen before.
“Ms O’Kane?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Can I have a word with you?”
“Are you interested in my pictures?”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of an art collector.”
She nodded, “You’ve just come to browse. Same as most people.”
“I love this one.” I pointed to the avuncular looking dinner-jacketed man in the large golden frame.
“My father,” she said, gazing across. “He’s a successful businessman. Disapproves of his scruffy ill-disciplined daughter. He thinks I should get a proper career.”
Her father? The lie seemed practised, as if the offhand Daddy’s-girl act had become a part of her. Of course this man could have been her adoptive father, so perhaps not such a lie after all. Her follow-up smile was polite, verging on desperate. I’d noticed that a number of the pictures in the gallery had red SOLD stickers attached to them, but I couldn’t see any attached to Shelly’s work.
She stared at me more closely, frowning. “Sorry, but I’ve met so many people over the past few days and I have a hopeless memory for faces.” Her voice was direct and assured, and there was an underlying trace of cockney. “Am I supposed to know you?”
<
br /> “No.” I took a breath. “Look, Ms O’Kane–”
“Shelly, please.”
“Shelly. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
“Look, what’s this about?” The smile had vanished now, as abruptly snuffed out as a temporary flash of sun on a cloudy day. As she lifted a hand to move hair away from her eyes I noticed the striations on the inside of her wrist, raised scar tissue against the thin pale skin.
“It’s awkward. Can we sit down?”
She was staring at me.
“If you’ve got something to tell me, just get on with it.”
“I want to ask you about your mother. Maggi O’Kane.”
Her face turned to granite, the trace of colour vanishing to leave her cheeks blanched. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.” She walked quickly away to a door in the far corner of the room.
“Look, please listen–” I caught her up, grabbed her arm.
“Get off me!” She tore herself away. “If you don’t go I’m going to call Security.”
“Please, just give me a chance to explain—”
“—Like the reporters did with my grandparents?” She rounded on me, eyes blazing. “Like the bastard who was writing a book, who actually came to my school, so the other kids laughed at me for weeks? Just go and rake up some grubby little scandal somewhere else. Or preferably just crawl away and die!”
She was off and walking fast along through the reception room.
I followed her out onto the road. The traffic was busy, and, barely looking where she was going, Shelly dashed across behind a bus, the blare of a car’s horn accompanying the screech of brakes.
Crossing the road, I scanned to right and left, afraid I’d missed her. I ran back, re-tracing the steps she’d taken, and caught sight of her cowering in a shop doorway. She had an aerosol can in her hand which was pointing in my direction as I approached her.
“If I spray this stuff in your face your eyes will be stinging for a week.”
“Your mother didn’t do it!” I yelled at her. “She didn’t murder your father and the others, nor did she kill herself. She was murdered. They were all murdered.”
“Murdered?”
A passing woman eyed us suspiciously as she walked on fast, anxious to get out of the way of trouble.
Shelly’s finger on the aerosol’s trigger slackened slightly.
“She was set up for some reason. I have proof that she was murdered. Your father too, and the other band members. For some reason your mother was killed by professionals and set up to look as if she was a killer who’d committed suicide.”
“Say that again?”
I held my hands up, surrender style. “I found an undeveloped film in a camera in the mansion where it happened. It shows the massacre as it was going on – the victims were in the picture but there were also two unknown men firing the shots.”
She still had the can pointed at my face, her expression disbelieving. But slowly her hand dropped.
“There’s a café round the corner.”
The Kiss-and-Tell Cafe had chipped plastic-covered tables, ketchup in ugly squeezable bottles and a sulky waitress who sniffed and wiped her nose with a filthy tissue as she took our orders. Shelly didn’t say a word until we were settled at a corner table with our coffees.
I told her everything, including my determination to somehow find proof of her mother’s innocence so that I could set the record straight. When I laid the photographs on the table, she picked each up, staring carefully, saying nothing for a long time.
“I grew up with my grandparents – that is the parents of Alistair Norbury, my father,” Shelly explained. “As you can imagine, they hated my mum and what she’d done. She’d taken their son away from them, I was all that was left. They couldn’t say anything to me, of course, not while I was a child. But the other children at school knew all about it. Your mum killed your dad, your mum killed your dad. They chanted it at me in playtime, as if it was a song. That’s pretty heavy stuff for anyone to grow up with. When I told them what the other children said, my grandparents told me the truth, explaining that ‘my mummy was very ill at the time’. That she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Of course.”
“But I was lucky. I was fairly self reliant at school, discovered that I was good at something, that I could get absorbed in my art. Painting and drawing. Taking photographs. Those things were everything to me, and I was accepted at the Slade School of Art and then did a postgraduate course. Every now and again, some bastard of a journalist tracks me down and asks me about my mother to use in some scabby piece he’s writing, and so far I’ve always managed to give them the slip. If they approach me officially, I get a solicitor to block their advances. If they have the nerve to just come up to me, as you did, all I can do is get away.”
“Or spray them with mace.”
“I’d never have done it. Not to you.”
I sighed. “I’m truly sorry about the way I just barged up to you.”
She shrugged. “I’m glad you did. If you’d emailed or phoned I’d have brushed you off without listening to what you had to say.”
I stirred my black coffee, reluctantly tasting it and grimacing. I’d decided not to mention the John Lennon angle, because, as Giles had said, the photograph showed nothing and for all I knew the diary could have been the ramblings of a lunatic. “Have you any idea who might have wanted to kill all those people?”
“Haven’t got a clue.” She shook her head slowly. “But then I was only four at the time. Although I do remember grandma and grandpa going on about where was all the money.”
“Money? I assumed she was rich. After all she owned The Mansh, didn’t she?”
“That’s one of the many myths about my mum: Maggi O’Kane the Millionaire. Fact is, there was no money. According to Grandpa, my mother was bankrupt when she died. The Mansh was on a mortgage and they were about to foreclose.”
“How can that be? She was famous, she had platinum discs, she regularly toured the States.”
“I’m just telling you what Granddad said. Maybe Maggi gambled or something? Or someone swindled her? I just don’t know. I do vaguely remember my grandparents saying something about a row she’d been having with her production company.”
“But surely the production company was working for her?”
“Yes of course, but this was a long time ago. Nowadays it’s hard to believe the way it seemed to work, but my granddad explained how bloody crazy it all was. Apparently in the 70s, as now of course, the usual practice is for a rock star to be handled by an agent, production company or whatever. They would negotiate record deals, make all the arrangements for tours and so on, and, of course, all the money was paid to them, not to the individual artist, so that it was passed on, or looked after for them. Some of them capitalised on the relationship of trust, even preying on the naivety of the people they handled. For instance Ozzy Osbourne’s first manager handled all his affairs for him, absolutely everything. To the extent that he didn’t even handle his own money. If he wanted something, Ozzy would tell him. He’d phone and say ‘I want a Ferrari’, or even a house, and the manager would just buy it without question. So the artist could ask for, and get, literally anything, without needing to think of organising the payment. He didn’t have to think about arranging his own tax affairs, or paying bills for day-to-day living expenses. Artists were always busy, travelling the world for gigs, working on their compositions, part of their glamour was supposed to be that run-of-the-mill business dealings were beneath their dignity. They knew the money was rolling in, so they usually just left all the details to their management people.”
“That’s incredible.”
“These aren’t conventional characters, remember. The majority of honest agents would play fair, but an unscrupulous outfit could capitalise on that trust, and shamelessly abuse it.”
“Sounds crazy.”
“It’s certainly hard to believe people could be so naïve, isn�
��t it? But my mum and lots of others like her had no experience of earning a lot of money in a short time. Remember, these are rock stars – out and out extroverts who think it’s funny to smash up a hotel room or set fire to things or, like The Who, destroy valuable instruments on stage. They might blow thousands of pounds on drugs and partying in a single weekend. Quite frankly, from what I’ve been told, some of them sounded literally insane. And it wasn’t just legitimate things that the management company or individual supplied. They’d give them whatever else they wanted: girls, boys, the best, the purest drugs of every kind imaginable. That’s why rock stars are less likely than most to succumb to drug deaths, because the narcotics they take are pure and uncontaminated – the very best quality. So long as the artists could function as musicians it didn’t matter how chaotic their private lives were, and so the details of their incomes and outgoings were even more confused. Apparently rip-offs like that have happened time and time again, going right back to Elvis’s manager.”
Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1) Page 3