And of course there’d been the crazies too. The devil-worshipping group who broke in one night and held a black mass, the kids who went there as a dare and swore they saw the ghosts. In 1730 it had been built as the central heart of a number of surrounding farms. When the last of the owning family died in 1939, it remained unsold and fell into disrepair until Maggi bought it in 1969 and refurbished it, enthusing it with rock-star glamour, establishing one of the few independent recording studios in England at the time. However The Mansh had never been run on commercial lines, the musicians who worked there with Maggi were her friends and colleagues, it was her personal fiefdom. That’s what made the massacre all the harder to understand.
A couple of hours later I was trying to get warm in my sleeping bag, listening to the drumming of a particularly savage downpour of rain on the plywood windows, wondering if my car would be stuck in a muddy quagmire in the morning. I’d climbed the elaborate sweeping staircase and found this, the largest room at the front, which appeared to be the most amenable, known I guessed, as the one described as the ‘orgy room’.
There were high ceilings with elaborate carvings, a hole in the wall where there’d obviously been a huge fireplace and boarded-up windows. A stink of damp and mould and woodrot. Mouse droppings and spiders’ webs. About as erotic as an ear infection.
Eventually I managed to fall asleep, and began to dream about the holiday.
Ken Taylor and I had gone to Cornwall as rehabilitation after my ghastly experiences in St Michael’s psychiatric hospital. Ken had suggested the fishing break in Mousehole (pronounces Mowsell, as the locals informed me) as relaxing therapy, and his wife hadn’t objected to being left with their twins. Ken and I had reminisced about old times and relaxed in a way we hadn’t done since school. Bearded swarthy Nikki Prowse had owned the fishing launch MARY KENNY, and become a friend of ours, and he’d taken us out and lent us rods, shared his tales of his Cornish ancestors who were cutthroats and smugglers, while the sun beat down on the foaming waves and we waited in vain for the fish to bite.
But I wasn’t dreaming about Nikki, or even Ken. I was dreaming about Nikki’s sister Miranda, whom I’d got to know well one afternoon while Ken was away touring the ruins of an ancient church. Tall blonde Miranda’s shy smile had captivated me from the moment I’d first met her, and now I was dreaming that she actually had turned up on our final day as she’d promised. We’d seen each other for three evenings running, and yet, on that final day, she stood me up without a word. Now, in my dream, she was running towards me from a distance, shouting, but I couldn’t hear her words. I couldn’t make out why she was so upset, why she appeared to be weeping and imploring me to listen, or what exactly she was trying to tell me so earnestly.
I woke up in a sweat, re-living my disappointment when she hadn’t appeared on our final day, as she’d promised. It was only afterwards that things made sense, when Nikki told me about the married man she’d been seeing, how she’d been talking about going away with him, and that, of course, had explained her sudden departure, at the same time as that of the boyfriend, who’d simultaneously abandoned his wife and family. Although I’d been divorced a year, my marriage had effectively ended two years before that, and ever since I’d been looking for a serious girlfriend. I’d planned to ask Miranda if I could see her on a regular basis, and I’d hoped she might agree, but it wasn’t to be. Her betrayal was another setback to my delicate mental state, another disappointment I had to face. But as always at that time, it was Ken who had dragged me out of my depression. That was when we’d cooked up the idea of Crash and Burn, on the long drive back to London, while Ken kept moaning about the beloved St Christopher’s medal that had belonged to his grandfather that he’d lost: we worked out that he must have dropped it into the sea on our last fishing trip. Ken’s loss of the family heirloom apart, the prospect of interesting paid work had snapped me out of my gloom on our journey back to London, given me something to look forward to.
My next dream was much more disconcerting. I was here, in this house, and I was observing those 1980 events. Seeing Maggi O’Kane emerge from somewhere at the back of the hallway with the guitar case, place it on the floor, take out the assault weapon, lift it and fire. Chaos was everywhere: screaming and shouting, people tumbling down as they died. But thankfully my dream ended before Maggi had committed her final act, her suicide.
The crashing noise woke me up. Footsteps, outside on the stairs.
* * * *
Lying there, heartbeat cranked up high. Darkness. Apart from the splinter of moonlight that cast a ragged splinter of light along the ruined ceiling.
Muzzy headed, I leapt out of bed and ran to the doorway. In time to see the moonlight illuminating the man running downstairs.
Yes, I tell you, I did see him!
The short man in the smart suit I’d seen so many times before.
This time, I resolved to catch him, if only to prove that he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
I ran downstairs, keeping him in sight, watched him stumble at the bottom of the treads, then career towards the front door and pull it open. I tripped and fell down the last few stairs, spread-eagling in the hallway. Scrambled up from my hands and knees. But by the time I’d tumbled out of the front door I just managed to see his figure vanishing into the distance, melting into the landscape, swallowed up by the pouring rain. Barefooted, I stood outside, staring after him, mud oozing between my toes.
For all the world, it had looked like Edward Van Meer, the man I knew was behind bars. My brush with death at Van Meer’s hands was what had caused my breakdown in the first place, and, since I was now seeing him everywhere, it seemed as if I hadn’t recovered yet. Yet I wasn’t acting abnormally in any other way, so, I reasoned, there had to be some rational explanation for the man’s appearance. Of course Van Meer hated me for what had happened, and he’d told me, in one long rambling letter smuggled out of Broadmoor, that he longed to see me dead. But he was in prison, not here on the outskirts of Bath.
So was I heading for another breakdown?
I came back into the large hallway, pondering on the dream that I’d been so abruptly woken from.
Something in the dream was nagging at me. Some detail that the recreation of the scene I’d pictured so many times had inspired me to think of in a different way, the brain’s computer shuffling the facts and images, rearranging them in another semblance of order, perhaps a more logical one. Then I remembered.
A door.
That was it.
In all the reports about the accident that no one alive had actually witnessed, the professionals’ assumption was that Maggi had appeared from the door to the cellar with her guitar case containing the weapon, then stooped down to open it, beside that same cellar door, and then shot everyone from there.
However the only door that corresponded to what I’d imagined to be the cellar door I’d seen when I came in, was securely shut and locked when I’d tried it. Was there something beyond there that was worth looking at?
Sleep was impossible now, so I went back upstairs and picked up the powerful torch, pulled on jeans and a tee shirt and my trainers, and returned to the main hallway. Here there was more moonlight coming through the chinks in the plywood blocking the windows, and I went over to the locked door. I tried it again, but it was firmly shut. So I went outside to my Volvo estate car and took a crowbar and club hammer from the boot, returning to attack the locked door.
Hammering the chisel end of the crowbar into the gap, I exerted some leverage and after a while the old timber splintered and gave way. It swung backwards on its rusty hinges with a groan. I shone the torch ahead. A couple of feet in from the doorstep I could see some steps leading down. I moved forwards and began to descend, my yellow cone of torchlight shimmering around the walls.
The last thing I remember was feeling the blow to the back of my head.
I must have been out cold for some time. The throbbing pain made my vision blur. Someone had o
bviously crept up behind and slugged me with a heavy object, and I’d fallen down to the bottom of this shaft. Who could have done it? Who even knew that I was here? Clearly the man I’d chased earlier on had returned.
Shifting carefully, checking arm and leg movements, to my relief I appeared to be uninjured. The torch was unbroken, but its pathetic yellow glimmer told me its batteries were nearly flat. I was surrounded by the cheesy smell of damp stone, and soggy soil was under my fingertips – it looked as if the soft landing had saved me from injury. As I felt around with my fingers, I wondered how hard it was going to be to climb back to freedom. I stopped when my hand encountered something hard: a ledge of stone. And on its surface, to my surprise, there was something cold and metallic. I picked it up.
A camera. An old camera, the sort in use in the 70s, decades before the advent of digital photography. Shining the torch in the general area there was also a small black book. When I picked it up it appeared to be an old pocket diary. I could just make out the date 1980 in gold on the cover. Excitedly, I opened it up and there, sure enough, a few pages in were dates and handwriting, still legible after all these years. Unfortunately it was in a language I couldn’t understand, possibly German. Shining the torch around, I couldn’t see anything else. Whose diary could it be, I wondered? Despite my throbbing head, I felt the stirrings of excitement as I put the diary in my pocket and picked up the camera, then aimed the feeble torch beam towards the stairs.
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