Since I was in the area, I decided to visit the Mansh one more time. I parked nearby, then walked around the perimeter fence, wondering if I’d be able to find a way inside. Around the back, a long way from the road, where the trees of Gillingham Woods were towering over the six-foot wooden fence, I found a panel where some of the laths had come away. It was easy to squeeze through the gap, then jog along through the woods and out again, to the Mansh’s huge circular front drive.
The place looked much the same as when I’d seen it last, only now it was daylight it seemed in an even sadder state than last time. There was no one around, no one who noticed or cared when I levered away the timber panelling covering one of the broken ground-floor windows.
I walked across the hallway, comparing what I could see to the photos of the massacre. The huge elaborate staircase swept to the upper storeys, once magnificent, now the banisters broken and missing in places, the treads eaten up here and there by white fibrous tentacles and black mushrooms of rot that seemed to claw hungrily into the very fabric of the building. There were cracks in the walls and massive areas of plaster had dropped away, leaving coarse ugly tracts of bare red brickwork. I wandered from room to room, but try as I might I couldn’t match any of the photos to any of the features I could see now. The cellar was much the same, and my torch beam stabbed into every corner, but there were no more cameras or diaries. It was bare, apart from puddles, debris, dirt and the stink of dampness and decay.
Back in the main hallway, I climbed up to the first floor, looked down into the vast entrance hall, trying and failing to picture what it must have looked like. Then climbed higher to the second then the third landings, not bothering to go into any of the rooms, as it was just too dispiriting. On the third floor’s upper landing there was a broken-doored entrance into a short passage with a stairway leading upwards.
Then I heard the noises. Crashing and banging, from above, loud thuds. Above me had to be the loft space, and, remembering the seagull that had been trapped in the attic of the house in St Kilda’s, I thought of the poor creature’s terror and wondered if another bird was trapped. I climbed up the stairway and pushed open the hatch at the top.
I was right. There was a fluttering and crashing and banging, and I could just make out in the semi darkness, one or more flying creatures, possibly birds, maybe bats. Once inside the attic, I could stand up straight in the main section, but had to crouch in the eaves. There was a skylight a few yards away, a small part of its glass broken; presumably this was where the bird had got in, and in its panic it couldn’t see a way out.
The floor appeared to be boarded – there were no joists I could see, and the area supported my weight. I made my way to the skylight. Then, it was a simple matter to unlatch the roof window, tap it hard until the rusty metal frame came free, then open it up and fold it back onto the roof. I stepped away and waited, stooping on my haunches in the eaves.
The bird – it looked like a pigeon – flew towards the opening, then, with barely a pause, swooped through and up and out of sight. I followed it to the opening and looked out, in time to see it dip and dance through the sky. The leadenness overhead was a marked contrast to the day’s sunshine and petals of snow were falling, settling and drying on my face as I watched. All afternoon the sky had been an incredible cloudless blue.
Gingerly, I felt above my head, around the opening of the skylight. The tiles felt solid, secure. Recalling my days of climbing up ladders and scaffolding to work on roofs of all kinds, I hauled myself up and out onto the main tiled roofing area. I walked, or rather crawled, up the shallow incline, wary of sliding tiles, but enjoying the thrill of discovery, as the snowflakes fell more heavily. Eventually I reached the roof’s topmost point, the ridge, and climbed up and sat across it.
The view was incredible. In the distance I could see the buildings of Bath, the Abbey’s spire, the river’s winding course. Nearer there was an old derelict church, the tombstones tumbling at all angles. The trees of Gillingham Woods had caught a faint kiss of the snow on their branches, making them twinkle and sparkle in the dying sunlight. As I watched the faint white mist of falling snow that was beginning to cover the grass, I realised it was deadening sounds, wrapping everything up in silence. Cars were moving on the distant road, like toy vehicles in a child’s train-set layout.
Then I noticed Marsham House, a large old Victorian property I’d seen on the drive into town. From the road it had looked like a typical double-fronted Victorian manor house, golden Bathstone frontage, slightly forbidding. But from up here I could see the back of the place, and a large glass extension that was ultra modern, an amazingly dramatic 21st-century box, grafted onto the antique building, as absurd as a bright red Ferrari welded onto a tractor. It struck me that although this modern extension was obvious to see from here, from the roadside it was almost invisible, hidden as it was by the rest of the house.
Suddenly it made me realise that it echoed my life.
Danger comes from those we trust.
I don’t know why that sentence should have come into my mind, but it did: some past poet or philosopher’s gem of insight into what? I couldn’t work it out. Yet it made me think that something, some obvious thing, such as the hidden glass extension that was apparent when you saw it from another angle, was in front of me but I couldn’t see what it was. This something was right there, in amongst the flotsam of facts that were floating around my mind. The anomaly that should have been obvious to me, was somehow irrevocably hidden. Yet I had the most powerful feeling that if only I could have seen this one glaringly obvious thing, this single strange conundrum, only then would I be able to make some sense of what was going on in my life.
I didn’t know it then, but I was right. There was one thing that should have been clear to me at the time, but it remained shrouded in mystery because I couldn’t see it until it was very nearly too late.
So what the hell was it that I hadn’t realised?
Giles Mander’s sudden volte face when I’d spoken to him just now. Shelly’s mystery lover, whom she’d apparently allowed into her house before he’d killed her. Ken’s weird behaviour in Paris. And Maggi O’Kane’s apparent knowledge of some missing fact to do with John Lennon’s murder.
Something, the answer to everything, appeared to be flickering there, tossing about in the wind, just a hair’s breadth out of reach of my consciousness, like a crazy half-remembered dream, one second almost there, the next, tantalisingly gone. So fleeting, so ephemeral, that however hard I tried to capture what it was it always always eluded me.
Danger comes from those we trust.
What the hell did it mean?
And why on earth had it sprung into my mind?
My phone rang, breaking my maudlin mood. I pulled it from my pocket and answered.
“Jack? This is Jane.”
“Hi.”
“Where are you?”
“Sitting on top of the roof of Gillingham Hall. It’s amazing. I can see right across the county towards Bath, I can see fields and hills and trees. It’s snowing. It looks wonderful. Like some Breughel scene. Apart from the cars.”
“Do you like Breughel?”
“My favourite artist.” I thought of the many snow scenes painted by the 16th-century Flemish artist that I’d enjoyed over the years. The white landscapes, the stick-like people…
“Has your phone got a camera?”
“Yes.”
“Then take a picture and send it to me.”
I did so, took several, and sent them, waiting for the ‘sent’ message on my screen.
“What do you think?” I asked her when I phoned back.
“Beautiful, like you said. But Jack, is it safe up there on the roof?”
“Of course.”
There was a pause.
“Don’t you want to know why I rang?”
“Why did you ring?”
“You said you were thinking about me.” There was a pause, she cleared her throat. “I wanted to te
ll you I’m thinking about you too. When can I see you again?”
“Soon as I get back. A couple of days.” I wanted to tell her about my conversation with Giles, about how I hadn’t thought about Van Meer all day, about how I felt as if my life was on track at last. But I couldn’t think to tell her any of it. All I could think of was her face.
“And Jack?”
“What?”
“Be careful.”
On impulse I phoned Ken and told him about my potential new relationship with Jane, because I desperately wanted to share it with someone.
* * * *
Edgerton Row turned out to be one of the roads near the seafront, behind the long thoroughfare known as Beach Street that fronts the sea. The lovely coastal town of Deal in Kent seemed a desolate place on a winter’s evening, the long line of Beach Street parallel to the ocean, the pier stretching out into the black depths of the sea, dark and forbidding. Lights twinkling in the distance far out to sea were presumably boats moored at anchor along the coast. Parking on the yellow line of Beach Street, I walked for a while, following the map, and finally found Edgerton Row.
As a contrast to the beautiful white blanket of snow that had covered the West Country when I’d left it yesterday, this furthermost edge of the Isle of Thanet looked windswept, dirty and bleak in the darkness.
When I’d met Giles Mander in London that morning, the interview was more fruitful than I could have hoped. He realised that I was sincere in my apologies. Then he admitted that maybe Figaro’s decision had been a bit hasty. He explained that as it turned out, the book’s production process had already been slotted into their work schedule, and no other project had materialised to fill the gap. If I was prepared to make a few tweaks to the original outline of the book, there might be a way to salvage something. Strangely enough he was conciliatory, as anxious as I was to heal the breach between us, apologising for his previous actions.
“Sorry Jack, but I’m under a lot of pressure,” he explained. “We’d been having our troubles here, my own job’s been under threat and I’d just come out of a pretty hectic meeting when we argued that day. Goodness knows what’s happening to our economy. Northern Rock nearly went bankrupt earlier this year, and it’s only a couple of months since Lehman Brothers went under, and my God, the financial shockwaves from that are worse than anything we could have imagined. And afterwards, when you didn’t give me an answer on the Monday, and I couldn’t even reach you by phone, I though bugger this, I reckoned you were just being bloody minded: deliberately staying out of touch, to try and prove some kind of point. I didn’t realise myself when we were talking, but apparently LoneWolf Productions are part of the same conglomerate of businesses as Figaro. We couldn’t possibly print anything that was even faintly critical of LoneWolf, especially when things are on a knife edge as they are. I would have liked to explain all that to you, but I couldn’t get you on the phone.”
“Sure, I understand. Look, Giles, I turned the phone off because I had some trouble with a woman, I didn’t want to talk to her, it was nothing to do with you. Before that I admit, I was inflexible and unprofessional.”
“I’m glad you see things this way, Jack. Really glad. So you’ll be able to deliver the manuscript in a fortnight – or say three weeks if that makes things easier? Our competitor, who was doing a rival book, has gone bust so that’s one less bit of competition to worry about. And we don’t have to stick to the original deadline?”
“Fine.”
He coughed and looked down at his desk. “Also, I heard all about Maggi O’Kane’s daughter. About your involvement with her, and what happened. I’m very sorry.”
“How did you hear?”
“It was in one of the tabloid newspapers, some grubby little article, someone phoned me to tell me about it. That you’d had an affair with her, and she was murdered. Horrible thing to happen, and I’m just so so sorry.”
I realised that the police’s promise to keep the information confidential had gone by the wayside.
His handshake was warmer than it ever had been before, he even used his other hand to clasp my shoulder. There was something altogether different about his attitude towards me and I couldn’t make out what it was.
“And I’m sorry about all our other misunderstandings too,” he coughed and looked down for a moment. “You just get impressions and act on them without even thinking, don’t you? But I was wrong, and I admit it. How about if we wipe the slate clean and start again? Look Jack, it’s a hell of a recession as you know, but thank God there are still a few readers out there who are keeping us afloat. Judging by what I’ve seen of Crash and Burn I think you’ve got what it takes. I have had a few ideas about other books you might like to think about writing after this. After Crash and Burn’s put to bed, let’s get together and have a chat over a long boozy dinner.”
“Great, thanks.”
Giles’s metamorphosis was strange, I just couldn’t understand it. But all thanks to Jane’s advice, my financial future looked on slightly more solid ground, even if, as Giles had hinted, the spectre of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and the Northern Rock Building Society’s rescue from the brink was threatening to presage years of recession. I couldn’t work out what he’d meant ‘all the other misunderstandings’, the ‘wrong impressions’ he’d had about me, but what did it matter? My book was on again, and there might be others in future.
Then, when I was about to start the long drive back to Kent, Melanie Deeprose had phoned me, saying that she wanted me to meet her professor, some urgent thing she wanted me to discuss about her thesis concerning aspects of the mentality of Edward Van Meer, whom, she was convinced, I knew a lot about. Apparently it was vital for her thesis to be finished this week. I was tired, and I didn’t like the bloody woman. But Deal was only about a 40-minute drive from my house to the coast, so I couldn’t see the harm. After all it was someone’s career, and I’ve always taken the view that if you can help someone, you should do it if you can.
Remembering Melanie Deeprose reminded me of Edward Van Meer. It was ironic that while I knew he was locked up in Broadmoor, I’d thought he was following me, indeed kept seeing him everywhere I went. Yet now that he actually was on the outside, I hadn’t seen him for days.
But of course I knew he was still out there.
Somewhere.
For the umpteenth time, I squeezed the stock of the heavy gun in the large outside pocket of my waterproof jacket, savouring the reassuring feeling of the patterned grid of steel latching hard against my gloved palm. I was wearing gloves, and had been pathologically careful to make sure that my fingerprints never appeared on the gun, making sure that I never handled it unless I was wearing gloves of some kind. I’d envisaged all kinds of scenarios for my showdown with Van Meer, should it ever come to it. One of them was where I shot him, managed to get away, but subsequently the gun fell into police hands. Should such a thing happen, if the gun could be traced to me I’d be sentenced for murder, as well as possession of a firearm, irrespective of the danger my life might have been in, and the onus would be on me to prove that Van Meer wanted to kill me. It was far simpler just to plan to run and hope I was never caught.
Once again I wondered if it had been a mistake to ask for the extra powerful .44 magnum weapon, because of the practical difficulties of using such a powerful gun. I tried to remember the words of the gun club steward who’d given me a few lessons, his admonitions to hold it tight, two-handed, squint along the sights, level it at the target, take aim, then squeeze, never jerk the trigger: a good shot is one smooth choreographed movement, not a random stuttering jerk.
And what was that other maxim, the one police and criminals always like to use?
Nothing ever goes to plan.
It was something I was getting used to. It was why I’d got into the habit of carrying the gun everywhere I went nowadays, even this trip to Deal to see crazy Melanie. The address I’d arranged to meet her was apparently the home of one of her professors.
Edgerton Row was a short road, and the houses were terraced, down at heel, and some of them looked as if they’d been uninhabited for a long time. Had I got the right address? I double checked the text she’d sent me. Yes, it seemed to be correct.
Number 23 was on the end of the bleak stretch, the paint of its front door splitting and flaking off. There were no lights on, and when I came closer I noticed it was open a crack. It squealed in protest as I carefully pushed it inwards into the dark interior. I went inside, shone my torch around the walls.
“Melanie?” I called out.
No reply.
Outside the rain was falling faster, drumming against the window. I found the light switch, but when I turned it on, nothing happened. I looked at my mobile, clicked on my inbox and re-read her text yet again. Yes, definitely this number, this street, sent only a few minutes earlier. Yet this house appeared to be empty and derelict. Was she supposed to be meeting me outside, after all? If so, where the hell was she? She certainly wasn’t staying at this address, no one was. I’d had enough of Melanie messing me about, and I felt like telling her so.
Just as I was about to dial her number, my phone rang.
“Hi Jack.”
Jane’s voice. Immediately my anxiety lifted, and in the cold miserable darkness of this tiny empty house, I saw her face in my mind’s eye, wishing she was near.
“Jane, look I’m–”
“–Be quiet and listen, Jack, this is important,” she interrupted me, talking fast. “You were telling me about Melanie Deeprose, yeah? The irritating psychologist woman who’s been talking to Van Meer in prison, who wanted to use his case to help with her thesis?”
Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1) Page 18