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

by Geoffrey West

  “Please Jane,” I begged her. “Please don’t hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Jack. It’s almost worse – that’s the tragedy of it. I liked you a lot. I really liked you so much and I wanted to get to know you better. But that’s impossible now because I can’t trust you. You’ve got your own agenda which you won’t share with me. And in any kind of relationship, trust is what really matters.”

  “All right, meet me, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  “If you told me everything I’d have to arrest you, wouldn’t I? Besides, after all this, how could I believe a word you say? And that’s not all. You might like to know that the man we arrested for Shelly Hart’s murder turns out to have a cast-iron alibi, so we’ve had to let him go, and we’re back to square one. I think you know more about her death than you’re saying. I phoned a mate who used to work with you when you were a BIA. You didn’t always play by the rules in those days, either, did you? Always the maverick, out there doing your own thing. Prepared to use people to get a result.”

  “Do you really think I had anything to do with Shelly’s murder?”

  “I don’t think you actually killed her, because your motive’s solid. But I think you know more than you’re saying. But do you know what hurts most, Jack? It’s that I don’t think you ever were interested in me, were you? You probably just thought it would be handy to have someone on the inside of the investigation who could tell you what was going on, in case things turned nasty with the Shelly Hart inquiry.”

  “No. That isn’t true.”

  “Well it makes no odds now anyway. We’re finished, Jack.”

  “Please, Jane, please listen to me–”

  “Don’t call me again.”

  * * * *

  The knock on my door came early on Wednesday. Not conventionally early, but after the hectic time I’d had in the last few days, 11 o’clock seemed like the crack of dawn to me. I hadn’t slept well that night, depression about my failed relationship with Jane dragging me down. I’d been going over and over the things I’d done in recent days, and realised that Jane was right in a lot of ways. I couldn’t tell her the whole truth because that would have compromised her professionally. So she was right. We had no future together. Pretending otherwise was just kidding myself. She thought I’d used her, tried to manipulate her, that I’d never found her attractive in the first place, just tried to get close to her as a ploy. I knew that I had a number of enemies amongst the police officers I used to work with, and whoever she’d spoken to about me had obviously been one of them, and he’d told her that I was a manipulative user, who couldn’t be trusted. How could I blame her for believing him?

  I’d eventually dropped off to sleep around dawn, with the gloomy certainty that nothing I could do or say was going to make her change her mind. I’d blown my chances for good.

  “Hi,” said the man on my doorstep. “Do you remember me?”

  “Sorry, should I?” I replied, tying my dressing gown tighter around my waist.

  My visitor looked to be in his 70s, very tall with a minimal amount of silver hair, a Barbour jacket that had seen better days, bright blue eyes and a large white moustache.

  “Gavin Strickland. We met at Oxford Street underground station in London about three weeks ago. The fire? You helped me to safety – in fact you saved my life. I’ve been laid up since it happened, only just back on my feet, hence the delay in seeing you.”

  Now I remembered the old man I’d pulled from under the feet of the crowd what seemed like years ago now, but was in fact only 19 days.

  “There was no need for you to come all this way.”

  “Nonsense old boy. Least I can do is come personally to thank you. Not the sort of thing you can say over the phone.”

  “Well, thanks, come on in.”

  “Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?”

  Gavin bustled into my hallway and I took him straight to the kitchen/breakfast room. The picture window at the far end of the room never failed to impress visitors, particularly on a sunny day like today, when the fields and trees of the Glossop Valley were below in all their glory.

  “My word, what a view!” he said, beaming with delight. “Quite takes my breath away. What a lovely valley. I grew up in Africa, you know, Cape Town.”

  Gavin was good company, he chatted away for ages, and we ate fried eggs and toast together at the kitchen table. He’d peeled off the Barbour jacket to reveal a flamboyantly patterned pullover.

  “Look, Jack, this wasn’t just a social call,” Gavin said, pushing his plate away and leaning forwards. “Fact is, I wanted to know if there’s anything I can do to help you in return for what you did for me. It’s a tad awkward, and I don’t really know quite how to put this. I’m fairly comfortably off, you see, and I would very much like to do something to show my appreciation. I know you didn’t help me with any idea of reward, of course I realise that. And it’s crass to offer you money, I wouldn’t want to offend you. But if you could consider accepting something, some kind of gift perhaps, as a gesture of friendship? Or perhaps there’s a charity you support? Or maybe a business you’re connected with that needs some help?”

  “Thank you Gavin, but no,” I replied. “Honestly I’m not offended, it’s a really kind offer that I appreciate, but really you don’t owe me a thing. I was glad to help.”

  “I thought you’d say that.”

  “But I’ve enjoyed talking to you, and I hope we can stay in touch.”

  “Absolutely, absolutely, old boy.” His smile lit up those twinkling blue eyes. “I live just outside London, so if you’re ever down south do pop in and stay if you want – stay as long as you like, my wife would love to meet you. Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot. One of the reasons I had for coming – aside from saying hello and thanking you personally.” He reached into an inside pocket and produced a small book. To my delight I saw that it was the diary I’d found at the Mansh, that I thought had been lost in the fire. “Is this yours? I found it in the pocket of my jacket after I came out of hospital. I have a vague memory of picking up things that fell out of my pocket after one of my falls, and must have collected this by mistake – and tucked inside it was your business card: of course that’s how I knew how to find you. I was pretty certain the diary must be yours. Did you drop it?”

  “Yes, yes I did. And thank you very much Gavin. Right now, this is more important than money to me.”

  “Delighted to help,” he said. “It looked like something important and I didn’t want to trust it to the post. Hope you don’t mind, but I had a look inside. Remarkably interesting.”

  “I just skimmed through it, but it looked like German, and I’m not familiar with the language,” I said, opening up the cover and looking at the handwriting. I explained how I’d found it, and the circumstances surrounding my discovery. Found myself telling him some of my recent troubles. “I’m not even sure this is German.”

  “Oh it is German. Quite definitely.”

  “Is it?”

  “Absolutely. I know a bit of German, in fact. Not fluent mind you, but I worked out there for a while.”

  “Can you translate any of it?”

  “Only a few words I’m afraid.” He took the diary back and flicked through it. “But look here, in the final entry, here are some English names: Mark David Chapman... John Lennon.”

  “I’ll try and translate this bit as best I can,” said Gavin, putting on some spectacles he’d fished out of a pocket. “Here we are. No one will believe the truth about what actually happened, and the involvement of the American security services. Maggi has been talking to people, but no one takes any notice. I told her it was a dangerous secret. What’s this bit? Hmm, handwriting’s a bit garbled, I’m not sure. I think it’s something like I keep telling her not to tell people, but she thinks nothing can happen to her. She thinks she can bring it all out into the open. Does that make any sense to you?”

  I sat back and closed my eyes. John Lennon and George Harris
on had apparently both, separately, come to the Mansh on various occasions. Maggi O’Kane had mixed with them socially and professionally, as she had mixed with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Phil Collins and a host of other rock-star royalty. As everyone knew, John Lennon had been murdered: shot dead on the doorstep of his apartment block ‘The Dakota’, in New York on 8 December 1980 by Mark David Chapman, a mentally deranged loner who had travelled from Honolulu to assassinate the man he was obsessed with. Chapman had also been fanatical about the novel Catcher in the Rye, had even had a copy on him when he shot Lennon. Afterwards he’d calmly waited to be arrested and was now languishing in prison for life. Those were incontrovertible facts.

  Weren’t they?

  “Do you remember the day John Lennon was assassinated?” I asked Gavin.

  “Ha, now that’s one of the classic questions isn’t it? The others are what were you doing when John Kennedy was shot, and the day Elvis had his heart attack. Pretty momentous moments in history. As it happens I do remember remarkably well. It was the first day of my honeymoon. Ingrid and I had gone to Paris. The news overshadowed everything, people were glued to the TV, everyone was talking about it – when people at the hotel found out we were English they rushed up to us, asked us all kinds of questions that we couldn’t answer. I wouldn’t say it spoilt the honeymoon exactly, because neither of us were particular fans. Although I know Lennon is reckoned to be a genius, one of the most enlightened pop stars and poets of the 20th century, gifted musician and so on. But I always thought it was Paul who had the real talent.”

  “The Beatles were before my time.”

  “I grew up with their music. In 1960 I was 21, going to discos, meeting girls, finding my feet in the world, and the Fab Four were at the heart of youth culture. Now, what’s that band you were telling me about? Border Crossing? Maggi O’Kane’s group? If I remember rightly, I think that they’d had one or two musical collaborations with each of the Beatles during the 70s, after their break up in 1967. George Harrison certainly, Lennon I think. Or maybe Maggi just helped out and supported them musically. Now may I have another look at that diary?”

  At the time of the killing I knew that there’d been all kinds of conspiracy theories about the CIA and Britain’s MI6 wanting Lennon silenced because his campaigns to promote peace were undermining the various clandestine wars that were proliferating at the time.

  “What do you think about all the conspiracy theories?” I asked Gavin.

  He sat back and shook his head. “In my view utter and complete nonsense. The one about Chapman, the killer, being programmed by the CIA to shoot Lennon, that he was brainwashed in some way. A few years earlier, during the time of the Vietnam war, when Lennon was allegedly being monitored by the FBI because of his anti-war sentiments and sayings, then, yes, there might have been some credence to the theory that the American secret services wanted him dead. But in 1980 the very reverse was true. Besides, Chapman admitted that he did the act of his own volition, or rather because someone “in his head” told him to do it, he called it “the devil”. There was even some absurd twaddle about how Paul McCartney was supposed to have died in a car crash in 1966, burnt to an unrecognisable crisp, and the powers-that-be arranged for an actor who happened to be McCartney’s double to step into the role, as a way of preserving the earning power to the British treasury of Beatles music.”

  “So this actor is supposed to have gone on to become the man we know as Sir Paul McCartney?”

  “Yes. Laughable isn’t it? It ignores the rather obvious fact that if it was true, this McCartney ‘double’ apparently also had the musical ability to go on and write Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane and other classic songs, not to mention co-produce Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arguably one of their very finest albums of all time. He’d have had to be a Paul McCartney lookalike who also just happened to have McCartney’s prodigious musical talent as well. Absolute bosh. Anyway the relevance of all this is that one of the conspiracy theories about Lennon’s death is dependent on this rubbish, claiming that John was murdered because he was threatening to speak out about McCartney’s death cover-up. Simply two ridiculous theories that depend on each other for credence.”

  “Yet the killer was a deranged man? If it was a political assassination, how would they have persuaded a deranged man to do it?”

  “Precisely. There are as many crazy theories as there are crazy people, even one that says that the bestselling author Stephen King was Lennon’s killer! I don’t even know what planet that came from. Yet it’s all out there on the net. However, who’s to say there isn’t some other, more prosaic answer as to how and why Lennon was murdered? If there is, I suppose we’ll never know.”

  Was it possible that Maggi O’Kane had found some evidence to prove someone other than Chapman was behind Lennon’s murder? And if she had, had it been necessary for someone to go to extreme lengths to shut her up?

  “Gavin, what do you make of the name in the front of the diary?”

  “Geertrud Altmeier. And here’s an address in Hamburg, Germany. Do you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “Now let me see. The Beatles cut their musical teeth in Hamburg, so did a great many other British bands in the 60s and 70s. I daresay Border Crossing could have played there, and one of the band members could well have picked up a German girlfriend, who followed him back here. German groupies were quite the thing in those days. Did you ever hear about Anita Pallenberg, the German girlfriend of both Brian Jones and Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones? Not that one could ever describe her as a groupie: she was highly talented and articulate – a photographer I think, an artist as well. So was Astrid Kirchherr, the girlfriend of Stuart Sutcliffe, the man they called the Fifth Beatle, who played with the band in the early days, Lennon’s close friend. Stuart met Astrid, a gifted photographer and artist, out there and fell in love with her. He stayed out in Germany, and he died there, in Astrid’s arms.”

  Gavin left after he’d given me his contact details, and, as I shook his hand warmly, I realised that although I’d decided to write Crash and Burn by reporting on the Maggi O’Kane murder and suicide that was generally accepted, I couldn’t leave this last tantalising thread hanging. I had to find out the truth, especially if there was some kind of link to the death of John Lennon, though I couldn’t possibly imagine what this might be. If there was some truth in it, perhaps I could write another, separate, exposé of the facts?

  Practicalities: I had a month to finish Crash and Burn. If, as I was believing was increasingly likely, Maggi O’Kane and her band had been murdered, the question was who by and why? Shelly had told me her grandfather’s ideas about financial chicanery of her management company, and a showdown that Maggi was threatening, that LoneWolf wanted to prevent. But that had always sounded too far-fetched to me. However the circumstances surrounding the death of John Lennon were another matter altogether. If Maggi, or indeed any of the members of her group, knew any concrete facts about John Lennon’s assassination that the secret services of Britain or the USA didn’t want to become public knowledge, then the professional massacre of Maggi and her band members made perfect sense. I could spare a few more days to find out what I could, just for my own peace of mind. More chillingly, Jane had told me that the man who’d been arrested for Shelly’s murder had been released, so the enquiry was wide open once more. Supposing Shelly had told someone about what I’d discovered, and she’d been killed to shut her up? In the days after I’d told her about my discovery at the Mansh she must have spoken to a number of people about my theory.

  I had an address in Hamburg and a name, written down 30 years ago. It was the longest of long shots, but I decided to check it out.

  After all, getting out of the country was one way of keeping clear of Edward Van Meer.

  Chapter 13

  THE HAMBURGER

  As I sat on the plane I began to read the translation of the diary. I’d found a language college on the net, and one of the tutors
had been happy to do the job within a day.

  It had been a huge relief to know that all the times I’d thought I was being followed by Van Meer were not symptoms of impending insanity. But fear of the real Van Meer, who still had not been caught, were disturbing enough to make me wary of anyone following me. Perhaps that was why, when I was waiting for the train to London at Ebbsfleet station, I noticed the man who was watching me. True, he looked nothing like Van Meer, but I could have sworn he was looking my way. Were the police keeping a watch on my movements? I couldn’t imagine it would have been worth their while.

  Truth to tell, most of Geertud’s diary seemed full of banalities. However the entries towards the end, just prior to those of December the 20th, the day of the massacre, were the ones with what I’d hoped might be revelations about John Lennon’s death.

  According to Don Chandos, whom I’d phoned that morning, Geertrud had been the girlfriend of Robert Malachi-Brown, a rhythm/lead guitar player who’d sometimes jammed with Maggi O’Kane’s band, though he definitely wasn’t part of the permanent setup. My hope was that Robert had been there on the night of the massacre, had seen what had happened but had got away in time to save himself. I’d already tried in vain to trace his whereabouts without success. But since he’d had a German girlfriend, he might have gone to stay with her, hoping that no one would come after him, keeping his head down until he could assume it was safe to come home.

  I settled down to read the final diary entry for December 19th, the day before the massacre:

  Robert has been in a weird mood all day. What have I done? He tells me it’s nothing to do with me, it’s Maggi. Maggi wants him out of the house, to stop playing with her band, has been crazy and unpredictable all day. Robert says it’s a bad acid trip, but I think it’s something more than that. There’ve been threatening phone calls. Maggi’s scared about something. She’s talking about getting a gun to protect herself. Saying things like they wouldn’t dare do it... I told Robert it’s not worth it, that we should just leave, but he is stubborn...