It stopped there, in the middle of a sentence as if she’d been interrupted. I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes, wondering if I’d be able to sleep.
* * * *
Hamburg Fuhlsbuttel airport was five miles north of the city itself, and I took a taxi from the ranks in front of Terminal 1 to a hotel the driver recommended, not far from Budapester Street, which was on the edge of the St Pauli district, which I’d read about.
After a meal in the hotel’s small dining room, I wandered out and almost immediately found the famous Reeperbahn. It was a lot like London’s Soho district, with music venues, DJ bars, and adverts in English for Lap- and Pole-dancing, even sex video shops. I wandered around, and eventually came to Grosse Freiheit 36, which appeared to be a rock music venue, judging by the signs outside. In one part signs for the area’s dubious attractions spanned right across the road, a couple of them featuring somewhere called Dollhouse. I noticed the ‘Beatles Square’ built at the corner where Grosse Freiheit led off the Reeperbahn, to commemorate the Fab Four’s many performances in the area: the venues they’d played at were the Kaiserkeller, Indra and Star clubs, from what I could remember from my research. Further down was Spielbudenplatz, what appeared to be a very old part of town, which had several theatres.
I finished my lonely walk wandering along towards the river, passing the Erotic Art Museum, to reach St Pauli Fischmarkt on the harbour’s edge. Following the waterside eventually took me to Johan isbol werk, where there was the historic moored ship Rickmer Rickmers, plus a variety of other large ships at anchor.
The following morning I bought a map of the city and took a bus to Willy-Brandt-Street which was near the Vootenbahn, the address given in Geertrud Altmeier’s diary. To my relief there was still a number 33, a large thirties building that looked as if it had been divided into flats. I rang on the bell.
“Ya?” said the voice on the intercom.
“Sprechen Anglais?”
“Nien.”
“I’m, looking for Geertrud Altmeier. She lived here 30 years ago.”
She spoke in German, and refused to let me in. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, nor could she understand me.
I wandered back to town and wondered what my next step should be. It had been stupid to come here, I now realised, especially as I couldn’t speak German. At the hotel I had some luck. The receptionist, a thirtyish blonde girl who never smiled, spoke good English, and when I explained my problem, she found the phone directory for the area, highlighting six Altmeiers in the locality. She was kind enough to phone them for me, and the fifth one turned out to be Geertrud Altmeier’s daughter. Even better, she spoke English.
My new friend passed across the phone receiver.
“Is your mother the Geertud Altmeier who used to live at 33 Vootenbahn?” I asked.
“Yes. She died three years ago. You were a friend, yes?”
“No. I was really looking for her partner – boyfriend at that time. Robert Malachi-Brown.”
“Robert? Yes, he is still much around. He lived with my mother and took work here. He is my stepfather, I like him very much. Now I’m living with my boyfriend I do not see him as much as I should. Would you like me to contact Robert for you and pass on your details?”
“Yes please, thank you.”
“Can I say why you want to talk to him?”
“I’m researching a book about a musician who died a long time ago. Maggi O’Kane.”
“Ya. You give me your mobile number and I get back to you, yes?”
Half an hour later I got the call.
“Jack Lockwood? This is Robert Malachi-Brown. Who are you?”
“I’m a psychologist, researching the death of Maggi O’Kane and her band.”
“Fuck. I knew someone would catch up with me one day.”
* * * *
We arranged to meet at a café at the Altsterakaden, which turned out to be a waterside mall-type building, which housed clothes stores, cafes and restaurants. It was like a white corridor with elaborate decorated ceilings, and was packed with people walking, or going in and out of the shops opposite the beautiful white colonnaded arches, which were called the Alster Arcades. This busy passageway was on the bank of the Alsterfleet canal, and, from my vantage point at the café table I could see through one of the colonnades and across the canal to the Rathaus, Hamburg’s grand Victorian gothic-style town hall, complete with statues, green roofs and a fine central clock tower whose pinnacle proudly touched the sky. This was the centre of the city, with grand historic buildings beside the Rathaus, and a bridge in the distance. On the walk here I’d passed a statue of a top-hatted figure, painted in bright colours, with a yoke around his shoulders attached to a pail that he carried in each hand. According to the guide book this was Herr Hummel, a 19th-century water-carrier who was famous for shouting abuse at children in the street.
I’d seen a few pictures of Robert Malachi-Brown from doing my research of the period. As he approached I almost recognised something about the youthful face I remembered from the photos, but it was mostly in the set of the mouth and the cool clear gaze. Everything else had changed for the worse. His face was wrecked. Lines ravaged his emaciated cheeks and forehead, and the jet black of his thinning hair was obviously not natural, throwing the lines and crevices in his skin into stark horrid focus. Most un-alluring of all was the large blubber-lipped mouth above a wrinkled turkey neck. He was wearing a grubby white tee shirt under a battered black denim jacket that seemed too large for his lanky, weedy frame.
“Jack Lockwood?” he asked.
“Yes, and you must be Robert.”
“That’s me.”
We sat at my table. All around were other people, talking and chatting, mostly holidaymakers. I ordered coffees.
“So what do you wanna know?” he asked.
He smelt of dirty clothes, stale cigarettes and second-hand booze. Rather than look me in the eyes he stared straight ahead.
“One section of a book I’m writing is about Maggi O’Kane and how she died. I found a diary in the old house where it happened – the Mansh. The diary belonged to Geertrud Altmeier, whom I understand was your girlfriend.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.”
I passed it across. His nicotine-stained fingers flicked through the pages, as he paused to bring it closer to his eyes every now and then.
“That’s Trudy’s handwriting. But how could it still have been in the Mansh? The police surely cleared everything after it happened, and this would have been evidence.”
“It was in the cellar. I found it quite by chance.”
“And you’ve read it?”
“Yes.”
“And I also found these in the same place.”
I took out the photos of the massacre and gave them to him. He opened the folder and looked at every one, frowning, staring. There were tears in his eyes and his voice was choked as he talked. “You know, all these years I’ve been terrified that someone was going to come and ask me about what happened, and I’ve dreaded it. But now it’s actually happening, nothing seems to matter anymore. Trudy’s dead, so she doesn’t care. It’s all so long ago, it seems as if it happened in another era, another universe. Nobody remembers, nobody cares anymore, do they?”
“I care. I’d like to know the truth.”
“So you can make some money?”
“No one’s paying me. It’s for my own peace of mind. For posterity, and the sake of Maggi O’Kane’s memory. It’s crazy, but after all this time finding out about her I feel as if I know her, can you understand that? It’s important to me to find out if she did this terrible thing. Were you at the Mansh when it happened?”
He nodded, staring into the distance. Then he finished his coffee and stood up.
“Let’s go for a walk, yeah?”
I followed him out through one of the white arcade openings and we walked along beside the canal until the road widened out. We strolled for a long time, and I was
n’t keeping track of the journey or the buildings we passed. When there was no one nearby, he stopped, turned towards me and curved his fingers, palms upwards, saying “Hands above your head, mate.”
He produced a small box from his pocket, flicked a switch and ran it all over my body, taking care to cover my chest and pocket areas in particular. When he’d finished he switched off the gadget and put it away. “No point asking you if you’re wired,” he explained. “You’d only lie to me if you were. This little beauty picks up anything. See, Jack, if I tell you what I know and you repeat it I’ll deny ever having said it. And if you reveal me as your source I’ll fucking find you and break every bone in your body. I will not risk having journos pestering me, destroying my peace, get me? Do you promise you’ll not repeat what I’m going to tell you?”
“Yes, I promise.” I hadn’t decided until that point to do so, but now the reality of the situation crystallised in my mind, and I realised the folly of exposing the truth at all costs. “Frankly, when I first found out about all this I was on a crusade to set the record straight. But it turns out that no one really cares, and nobody wants it published. I’ve risked my safety and my livelihood to try and do the honourable thing, but not anymore. This information is just for me, right? Not for money, not for self glorification. Just because after all I’ve gone through I want to know what happened. And why.”
He looked at me for a long time, before finally nodding. We walked on for quite a way until finally we were again beside water.
“Hamburg Harbour,” Robert said. “Second largest container port in Europe, after Rotterdam. That’s what made Hamburg what it is today, most of the goods in Germany come through here. The landing stages, they call them Landungsbrücken, are the longest in the world. They’re made to move with the tides.”
We found somewhere to sit down, and Robert stretched out his long thin legs in front of him, eyeing the knee-level slits in his frayed tatty jeans. The harbour was an impressive sight. For as far as you could see there were cranes lined up on the dockside, their steel arms raised up to the sky. A huge container ship was being unloaded as we watched, shouts and the sounds of clanging metal backgrounding the scene.
As he spoke, Robert stared into the distance, talking as if he was reliving the past, almost as if I wasn’t there.
“Okay. Well, we were down at the Mansh on that weekend. I’d been jamming in with Border Crossing but we’d had a row, it had been building up for a few days. The guys wanted me out of that session, they more or less threw me out. I found Trudy in the library smoking a joint and told her what had happened. I was pretty upset, as it goes. I thought Maggi and the boys were my friends. In a way I suppose they still were, but those musical disagreements, man, they’re something else, you know? One of those silly little things that blows up all of a sudden and things get said in the heat of the moment, and there’s no going back?
“So Trudy and I are downstairs in the library, there’s me slagging off Maggi and the others. We’ve got our bags all packed in the car, ready to leave. There was a lot of commotion in the hallway. Shouting and crashing around. Then we heard the shots. We saw the men with guns come in. Luckily they didn’t see us, or we’d have been dead meat too. Fuck, I felt like a coward, both of us did, just running like that, deserting all the others. But what could we do?”
At last I’d had a breakthrough. At last somebody was actually telling me the truth.
“I was told that these were staged photos,” I said. “Faked performances to help an artist design the cover for an album of Border Crossing’s called Assassination.”
He half smiled. “Who told you that?”
“Alfie Goldstein.”
“Lying bastard. There was no album called Assassination. He probably knew that Maggi was murdered and he didn’t care, wanted to keep it all quiet so he didn’t cause any trouble for anyone he knew who’d been involved in the old company.”
“So did you see any scenes like these?” I pointed to the photos.
He looked through the pictures again, slowly this time. “I saw one of these men.” He pointed to one of the killers. “Not the other. As I said, we saw the commotion when they arrived, we heard the shots and we legged it. I’ll never forget that night. We jumped into the car and we just took off down the lane into town, expecting hell on wheels to follow. Trudy had some money and our passports, luckily we’d already got most of our clothes and possessions packed already.”
“So do you know who those killers were?” I asked.
The sun was setting, spilling red clouds out across the sky, the redness bouncing back off the water. A single seagull swooped down low, shrieking before it picked up height again.
“Of course I don’t. But I can make some guesses. Because I was with Maggi and the guys during the days before it happened.”
I didn’t reply, not wanting to interrupt his flow. The sudden chill wind off the sea that had sprung up with the end of the day seemed to match his sombre mood and I shivered. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, staring into the distance. As he exhaled the smoke wafted on the breeze, floating above his craggy ravaged wreck of a face, like gossamer threads dancing over old cracked leather.
“Maggi had been in New York. She’d been there on the day that John Lennon was shot, that was on the 8th of December. Not actually that much of a coincidence, because that part of New York is where lots of musos used to hang out, you know? In fact the singer-songwriter James Taylor was only a few blocks away when it happened. Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in ‘The Dakota’, a big old apartment block – they owned several of the units. John and Yoko arrived home when this guy, an oddball called Mark David Chapman, shot him on the street outside the building. Maggi happened to be there, on the street, at the actual time it happened. She saw it happen. And do you know what she saw?” He paused to look at me for a long time. “Another gunman. The man who got away.”
“But according to what I’ve read Chapman fired all the shots. And I’ve also read about all the theories that Chapman was set up, programmed by some secret government body to do the assassination alone.”
“Don’t believe all that crap. The truth was much simpler than that.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the cigarette forgotten, burning between his fingers. “According to Maggi, and all the official reports, Mark Chapman pulled out his gun, went into combat stance and aimed. He fired his first shot, and it went wide, missing Lennon entirely.”
He stopped, drawing on his cigarette again.
“Then there was another shot. It hit John on the left hand side of his back. But Chapman didn’t fire it.”
“What?”
“Chapman did not fire the second shot. According to Maggi it was fired by someone standing behind Chapman. Immediately afterwards, Chapman opened up and fired three more times, one shot went in the left side of Lennon’s back, near the first, the other two went into his left shoulder.”
“So who was this other gunman?”
“Maggi’s theory was this: some government agency was watching over Lennon because they’d had a warning that there was a lone gunman on the loose. They were protecting him.”
“Protecting him? But you said–”
“Just shut up and listen!” He turned on me angrily. “This was Maggi’s theory, okay? Doesn’t mean to say she was right, it was just what she told us. What she told us, as she understood it. Maggi had been told by someone that spooks had been tailing Lennon for weeks, because they’d had a tip-off that there was a lone assassin out to get him. There were quite a number of nutcases out there who were after John Lennon. He was being “looked after” as they euphemistically say. At that time the American security services certainly didn’t want Lennon murdered, it would have been dreadful publicity for them, as indeed it turned out to be. A few years before that, yeah, when he was campaigning against the Vietnam war, when the Jimmy Carter administration were having him watched and spied on, Lennon was a pain, trying to derail the elections, they tried to depo
rt him. Killing him then, there would have been some purpose. But not in 1980. By then he was no threat to the American government, in fact he was a national asset. A hero.”
“So what exactly are you saying?”
“Maggi said that she was convinced that Mark Chapman may not have fired the shot that actually killed John Lennon. Maggi’s opinion was, it was an almighty cock-up. The security services man, who was there to watch Lennon’s back, suddenly saw Chapman pull out his pistol, go down on one knee like a professional marksman, and fire the first shot that missed: it shattered a window in the building. Instinct kicks in and the agent draws his own weapon and fires at Chapman. Only the second before he had the drop on Chapman’s head, Lennon’s presumed killer ducked fractionally, presumably to get a better aim. So instead of hitting Chapman he hit Lennon instead.”
“The man assigned to protect Lennon killed him by mistake?”
“Exactly. Maggi said that from where he was standing he saw Chapman in combat stance, clearly having fired the first, failed, shot, and she said that, just for a second, he was frozen, almost catatonic, were her words, as if the first failed shot had made him give up on the whole idea. But after that second shot had been fired by the agent, the bullet that was clearly intended for Chapman, it snapped him out of it. Chapman immediately fired three more times, and finished the job that the bodyguard started. Five shots fired in all, one of which went astray. Clearly it was one or more of the four shots to John’s back that did the terminal damage, but no one knows which one or ones. Either the second, third or fourth shot severed his aorta, causing massive haemorrhaging. So whoever fired the second shot could have been the one who actually killed him. Legally speaking, if that were the case, any shots fired after that point would not have caused his death, because the prior shot made his death inevitable.”
“Assuming the second shot was the one that did the most damage.”
“Which nobody can ever know.”
Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1) Page 22