I walked around the side, stepping carefully, not sure how close the cliff’s edge was, and saw that large parts of the back wall of the building had disappeared, leaving the curiously craggy ends of brickwork and the terminals of dusty timbers thrusting into the sky. Almost a third of the house had gone, and as I stepped closer to the edge of the cliff, I peered down to see a brick and a piece of dark timber floating in the sea. Hundreds of feet below, breakers were foaming across the dark, sharp, shiny rocks, and the sheer white chalk face of the cliff looked craggy and uneven, the house itself perched precariously on what appeared to be an outcrop. Clifftop Paradise appeared to be sloping too, as if what had been below the foundations had also been affected.
I stared, fascinated to see how the white chalk was undercut in a curve about six feet below the house, allowing only minimal support to what remained of the lonely ravished structure. The white of the cliffs was a contrast to the crumbling colours of plaster, brick and timber fragments that were dangling in the strong wind, some whipped around like streamers tied to a fairground hat. Seagulls perched on stranded rafters that stuck out into the sky and an old electric cable swung in the breeze. The weight of the house was finely balanced on this narrow lozenge of chalk, and at any moment another big chunk of building was likely to slide down into the sea.
Walking back to the front of the house I climbed through the window into what had evidently once been the reception room. I walked towards the hallway, where the staircase still survived. Underfoot there were hypodermic needles, scraps of tinfoil, a used contraceptive. Evidently this wrecked building served a purpose for all kinds of nefarious practices now. The floor sloped alarmingly, parts of soggy green carpet covered unhappy floorboards that sprouted clouds of white fungus and blackening mould. Crazily, a barometer was still on the wall, announcing that the weather was going to be rainy.
In the loft, Barry had said. So I had to get up to the top storey. As I began the climb up the stairs I nearly fell through a rotten tread. I thought I heard a car’s engine nearby, then slamming doors. But I soon dismissed the thought of a passing motorist seeing my trespassing, because by now no one would be able to see I was inside the house.
It was a bizarre experience, akin to being on board ship, climbing the stairs to the first and second storeys, the floor sloping and beyond, only a few yards away, there was just clear leaden sky and a long drop to the sea, where I could hear waves crashing against the rocks below. The house hadn’t been completely cleared of furniture, some items remained, such as the ancient sofa that was two thirds in the room, one third thrust out into nothingness, the only thing keeping the flapping carpet pinned to the sloping floor. I caught sight of individual bedrooms as I passed. Framed pictures still on the walls, tilted at weird angles. An old chest of drawers. I had to cling to the walls so as not to slide out towards the open end of the house and the sheer drop down to the sea.
The top storey landing. The loft access hatch was directly above my head. Fortunately, leaning up against the wall was an old wooden stepladder, and I dragged it under the hatch and opened it up, positioning the rickety structure as best I could on the alarmingly sloping floor. I tried not to think about the slim outcrop of chalk that was all that was left to support the house now, and the building’s precarious links to dry land.
Balanced on the top step of the ladder, I pushed the panel of timber up into the loft space, standing up to my full height to see the roof timbers and the triangular tableau of sky to my left, where the gable part of the roof on that side of the house had fallen into the sea.
There was a loud shriek. Something crashed against my head, knocking me sideways.
I fell off the ladder, accidently kicking it, sending it tipping sideways. I clung on to the rim of the roof hatch and dangled there for a moment. And had to watch helplessly as the ladder slid along the floor, into the bedroom, tumbling out over the precipice to oblivion.
Heart beating wildly, I hung there for a few seconds, feet treading air, realising that it had only been a seagull that had strayed into the house, in its panic flying at my head. I could easily let go and drop back down to the landing, but if I did that I’d never be able to get back into the loft to retrieve what I’d come for. With a superhuman effort I hauled myself up until I managed to sit on the edge of the hatch, then rolled sideways onto my stomach, hunkering on to my haunches inside the roof space and panting to get my breath back.
Then I heard the footsteps and voices from below.
Chapter 6
FIRST KILLINGS
Instinct made me move away from the loft hatch opening, careful to tread on the joists, not the space between.
Had it been footsteps, or some other sound from the dying house? Had I imagined the voices? I crouched there, heartbeat accelerating wildly, waiting for another telltale noise. As I was on the point of giving up I heard more footsteps. A scratch and a rattle. Then a sniff.
“Fucking racket.” The voice was a man’s, a high pitched northern whine. “What the hell happened?”
“Few tiles must’ve slipped off the roof or something, I dunno.” The other man had a South London accent, curt and sharp, as incisive as a razor blade.
“You sure he came in here?”
“Don’t start. We both saw him, didn’t we.”
“But it’s too early.”
“Who else is it going to be? Just shut up and let’s do the business. They want it to look like an accident, so all we’ve got to do is nudge him onto the rocks. Don’t even need to be tooled up for this one.”
Very slowly, I managed to manoeuvre myself so that I could see downwards, through the open hatch. Two men, both of them dressed in dark, anonymous zip-up tops and jeans. An older man with greying sideburns and a burly younger character whose prune-like face was puckered up into a sulky frown. Each man carried a black heavy-looking automatic pistol. They held the guns with an assurance borne of habit.
Who had sent them to kill me, and why? Professional hit men would have had no difficulty in tracing me, especially if someone at Barry Kite’s care home had told them I’d just visited. The memory of Alfie Goldstein’s bark of laughter rang in my ears. LoneWolf Productions were a powerful company that couldn’t afford bad publicity, or maybe Alfie himself had personally been involved in the murders of Maggi O’Kane and her band? Cedar Lodge had presumably contacted him, saying that I was visiting Kite, meaning that Goldstein knew I hadn’t believed his story of a fictitious album called Assassination. The big man, or someone else high up in the organisation he’d reported to, had quickly decided to employ a couple of professional killers to tie up the loose ends. For whatever reason LoneWolf were determined to keep the truth about the 28-year-old murders under wraps.
Trying to control my breathing, I frantically looked around the dark space, the dim daylight creeping in from the open end illuminating nothing but cardboard boxes, broken furniture and cobwebs.
Calculating fast, I tried to rate my chances.
They’d separated now, one of them completely out of sight, the other nudging the door to a bedroom open with his foot and stepping inside. How quickly could I jump down and descend the stairs before they saw me? Would there be enough time?
The only weapon I had was surprise.
Unless…
My groping fingers found something hard and round and cold to the touch. It was a length of pipe, discarded between the joists, almost lost in the fragmented roof insulation material. About a metre long. I lifted it, and its reassuring weight told me it was lead. I thought back to my bare-knuckle fighting days, the maxims I’d learnt the hard way. Never back down. Never run. Use any trick you can…
Slowly and carefully I eased back to the hatch, and looked down. Neither of them were in sight, each presumably searching in different parts of the upper storey to find me and kill me. Without hesitating I dropped down through the hatch, clutching the lead pipe in my right hand. I landed, collapsing in a heap.
The bedroom door opened abrup
tly. I charged at the man with the pistol and swung the pipe into his head. There was an sharp ugly cracking sound. He stood for a second swaying, then collapsed to his knees, finally crashing forwards face first, his gun arm flung out wide, an ever widening pool of blood encircling his head.
Almost simultaneously, a burst of shots rang out behind me, plaster showering into my face, temporarily blinding me. I dropped to the floor and rolled. The gunman ran towards me in time for me to swing the pipe upwards into his wrist, smashing the gun out of his hand, seeing it hurtling out of sight. He kicked me in the face, knocking me backwards. The lead pipe crashed into the wall, the resultant shockwave jerking it from my fingers.
He hit me again, a fist to my mouth that sent me sprawling. He ran across, pulled me up by the lapels and threw me backwards into the bedroom. When I tried to retaliate he was ready with his feet, an almighty kick to my chest flooring me once more. I fell down and slid, down and down along the sloping boards. Until it was too late to stop.
Time lurched into limbo as I slipped backwards on the slippery bare boards. The floor gave way to nothingness. I fell.
When I was practically over the edge I managed to grab hold of a projecting floor joist with one hand, then the other. I squeezed the fibrous timber limb as tightly as I could, dangling there, trying to pull myself upwards. I was dimly aware of something else too: metal. My hands were clasped around a large nail, fingers interlaced around it, clutching as tightly as if they were locked into a fervent prayer. Hugging it desperately, clinging on for my life.
A host of eclectic sensations. Wind tearing through my hair. Rain blurring my vision. Heart beating wildly enough to burst through my chest. A giddiness. An ever increasing agony in my fingertips. My body seemingly stretching downwards. A glimpse of foaming crashing waves far below.
My attacker was lost to view. Until I heard him charge forwards, grunting with the effort. I had a close-up of the sole of his dirty white trainer smashing down onto my fingers. I closed my eyes to steel myself against pain, determined to cling on.
But the agony never arrived. One second the trainer was directly above my head. The next its cheap rubber sole was blackening with blood, the foot impaled on the projecting nail. It jerked upwards, a haemorrhaging spurt spattering my face. Another trainer was in view, sliding on the floorboards, slipping on the widening slick of redness.
The next second there was a flurry of clattering and scrabbling. Then, with a shriek, he tumbled out and over my head. His terrified screams carried above the wind, louder than the keening seagulls’ cries. I heard a flopping, crunching sound far below.
I was shaking now. Trembling all over. Determined to hang on. I fought to keep control, and then, a few minutes later, I managed to haul myself up far enough to swing a foot up into the room. A second tremendous effort enabled me to drag my body behind it. I sat on the floor for a moment, hunched and panting, trying to gather my strength for what I had to do.
One thing I was sure of: whatever evidence might be in the loft needed to be found. If it was important enough for someone to kill me to stop me finding it, I had to get it at all costs. After this debacle there’d be no second chances. Despite the danger of staying here, I had to see things through.
Panting and exhausted, I began to make my way to the landing. Slowly, I walked back, wary of finding my other potential killer. But the man was sprawled where I’d last remembered him, the growing pool of blood around his head meandering across the floor in a dozen tiny rivulets. I knelt down beside him and felt for the carotid pulse in his neck, without success. I then prised the pistol from his grasp and moved it out of his reach, just in case, taking care to hold it with a tissue from my pocket, to prevent fingerprints.
How could I get back into the roof space now that the ladder was lost? In the bedroom I saw a tall heavy wardrobe. Sweating with the effort, I pulled it out onto the landing. Downstairs I remembered some wooden kitchen chairs and I went down and fetched one. Positioning it beside the wardrobe, I climbed onto it, then managed to pull myself up onto the top of the wardrobe. That gave me enough height to haul myself back into the loft.
The light in the sky was fading, but it was just enough to see the banks of boxes and bags and broken furniture. I started looking in boxes nearest the hatch, working systematically. I’d almost given up, discovering only old books and china, when some boxes marked ACCOUNTS. There were four of them. I found the one marked 1972 – 1981. I riffled through, finding piles of invoices, and bank statements. I looked at some of the invoices. Artwork for album cover. Studio photography. If Barry Kite had done artwork for Maggi O’Kane, the dates and details would be here.
Looked at another way, I hardly needed to look for proof anymore. Two hit men had been sent to kill me, so that alone was enough to verify that someone was keen that the truth about the 28-year-old massacre should be kept secret.
I folded down the lid of the Accounts box, and dragged another couple of closed boxes and some others which just said ‘photos’ on the side, and dropped them through the open hatch, watching them fall onto the top of the wardrobe below.
That’s when I heard the loud cracks and a groaning noise. If felt as if the house’s days had come to an end.
I just had time to drop myself through the opening before a terrific crashing sound occurred and a section of the roof and the far part of the floor of the loft fell away. Then I was on the landing, feeling the floor trembling beneath my feet. Piling all three boxes up into my arms, I climbed over the body of my would-be killer, then down both flights of stairs, before stumbling out of the broken window at the front. Panting on the grass, the boxes were beside me. At first glance the house didn’t look very different. But I knew that it wouldn’t be long before there was nothing left.
Two men were dead. Two men who’d been sent to kill me. Who had very nearly succeeded.
As I drove away, careful not to exceed the speed limit and draw attention to my car, I wondered if my suspicions about who had sent them were correct. I’d told Peter Barclay and Alfie Goldstein about my discoveries at the Mansh, but, in addition, Ken said he’d been phoning people and telling them about my experiences. And Giles might have told people too. It was hardly credible that anyone would have commissioned my murder to prevent the investigation of such a historic crime. But supposing that what Ken had told me on the phone was true? That there were other unexplained deaths of artists on LoneWolf’s books, that the company desperately did not want investigated? Which meant that the old murders were merely the first of many, the most recent of which was presumably that of Lucinda Lee.
* * * *
Of course the right thing to do would have been to call the police and wait there, then tell them exactly what had happened. But I’d just killed one man in self defence and another had died by accident. As far as I was aware I’d behaved within the law, using reasonable force to protect myself – after all they were armed and I wasn’t. But I had no witnesses. What’s more, the details of my accidentally running over and killing the drug-addled pedestrian, Martin Gallica, would be on their system, not to mention the particulars of my psychiatric history.
At home that evening there was an item on the South East news. Police had found the body of a man in a derelict house near St Kilda’s on the cliff top. He hadn’t yet been identified, but they were working on the assumption that the killing could be gang related, since the derelict house where he’d been found was notorious as a meeting place for drug dealers.
Suddenly another possibility slipped into place, and with a growing sense of relief I realised that this was a much more likely explanation for events. I remembered the needles on the floor of Clifftop Paradise. I remembered I’d pulled up my hood when I’d entered the house, so they hadn’t been able to see my features. Nor had they seen my face inside the house, because I’d retaliated before they’d been able to shoot me. It made sense: what if they’d arranged a rendezvous there with someone, intending to ambush and kill him, and when they saw m
e enter they thought I was him – no one else was likely to be entering a derelict building, or to initiate an attack on them. I remembered one of them saying ‘It’s too early’, presumably referring to an agreed rendezvous with someone they knew. But at the time it hadn’t registered. Perhaps the hit man had meant that it was too early for their pre-arranged meeting.
Relief washed over me. With any luck it had all been a case of mistaken identity.
Someone knocked on the door. It was my friend Stuart Billingham. He told me that morning he’d taken delivery of a 1963 Ford Mustang, one of my all-time favourite American classic cars. Could I spare some time to help him install the new engine? Stuart had a double garage at the back of his house, and a hydraulic engine lift, trolley jacks and a range of professional mechanics’ tools. I didn’t need asking twice, and when I arrived another friend of ours, Keith, a policeman whose obsession was American military Jeeps, decided to help, and the three of us had a very busy, but extremely interesting time. I didn’t leave Stuart’s house until around one am, tired but completely elated, remembering the unalloyed joy when we heard the glorious putter-click-purr as the Mustang’s new high-performance motor fired up for the first time.
That night I just about slept. But my dreams were peppered with horror. Van Meer, firing his gun into my mouth. But I didn’t die. I was on my feet, swinging the lead pipe into the man’s face, to find the features I had pulverised did not belong to the serial killer at all but were those of Giles. This time when I felt the lead connect with his skull, the bone wasn’t hard and resistant, but soft and mushy, and the pipe squashed right through the pulp into his neck, as if it was some fruit I could pulverise, that shot out a fountain of pulsating red liquid that was filling the room. I dropped the piece of lead, wading through the blood sea, and ran over to look at the face on the body that had miraculously reappeared. But instead of Giles’s face it was that of poor Martin Gallica, his eyes alive and entreating me to let him live, let him live, let him live…
Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1) Page 10