Well, now I had found my private space on a beautiful deserted beach but there was something missing. I needed someone there to shield me from the person who parked their car at night and watched me and sneaked around the place by day when I wasn’t there.
I needed Tommy—because he had been the person who had always shielded me before. But had I not vowed to stop using Tommy in this way?
I let myself into the cabin, selected my favorite mug from the Phillionaire’s collection of hand-painted Breton pottery and made myself coffee. I turned CNN on low and glanced every now and then at the news crawl running along the bottom of the screen. I was a little ashamed to admit that I found it hard to listen to the presenters talking and follow the crawl’s headlines at the same time. I’d read somewhere that other people complained about this problem but on closer examination I had discovered they were seniors. Clearly I was precocious in my senility.
Oh Tommy! He had never called me back.What else could I do to make him understand that I really did want to reach out to him?
I could, I decided after a moment or two’s thought, write him a letter. That was what I should do. I could lay it all out, calmly and rationally.
But exactly what was it that I wanted to say? That I was sorry
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he had lost his job? That it didn’t make any difference to us? That no matter how different we were I would always love him? This was beginning to sound suspiciously like a kiss-off letter, which was somewhat ironic given we were already separated. Clearly I would need to give it some thought.
I went out to the Jeep to get a notepad I had stashed in the glove compartment and that’s when I found the paper bag Scott Abernathy had given me. Bettina’s notes! I’d brought them home and forgotten all about them.
Scott hadn’t been exaggerating when he said she used whatever she could get her hands on to make notes.When I tossed the contents of the bag onto the kitchen counter I found old pre-scriptions, bills, a couple of menus, coasters, paper napkins, even toilet tissue as well as numerous indiscriminate scraps of paper torn from other sources.
I laid them out in a line and pieced together the snippets of mean, spidery writing. It was like trying to do a jigsaw. I was faced with a mass of seemingly random thoughts but after about ten minutes of fiddling I managed to shape them into some kind of disjointed narrative.
Shotgun’s people being evasive. Get Sean to persuade his father I’m right for bk.
Sean says he doesn’t understand why his mother suddenly got in touch with him but not going to query it. Overjoyed.
Angie Marriott alimony situation? No alimony as no divorce but does he support her?
Meet Shotgun at house Sept 10. 7:30.
P/up Sean 8:40 jitney. What if I’m still with Shotgun? Has Sean told Shotgun he’s talking to me? How close Sean and Shotgun?
Sean says Shotgun did kill groupie in London.
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Speak Genevieve re deal for unauthorized biog Shotgun if he won’t speak to me—from Sean interviews.
Call S to explain about Shotgun canceling & Scott—apologize re missing jitney.
M saw Sean w/shotgun in woods night before Sean killed. Must have been before I took him to jitney.Where were they going?
M saw something. Meet M Mallaby beach at 9.
That was it.
Right, so what did I have here? “S” was presumably Sean.
Her note about her meeting with Shotgun, scheduled for seven thirty on the night Sean was killed, was important. As was her subsequent note to remind herself to call Sean and apologize for not picking him up from the jitney because Shotgun had canceled and she’d gone out with Scott. It confirmed what I’d already heard from Shotgun but I was further intrigued to learn that Bettina had been Sean’s original ride to and from the jitney.
But the most explosive things in the notes concerned someone whose name began with “M.” M had seen Sean and his father in the woods together the night before Sean was killed. In fact, according to Bettina, M had seen something and she had been going to meet M at the beach near Mallaby at nine. Nine when?
The night she was killed? Was M the murderer?
“M” for Marriott? “M” for Mallaby? “M” for Morrison?
She’d say Shotgun, not Marriott, if she meant him. Mallaby was a house. That left Morrison.
Detective Morrison was a shoplifter but did that automatically make him a murderer? And would he investigate a case where he was the perpetrator? And why was I even imagining that a cop could be a murderer? Because I was paranoid, that’s why, and it was high time I stopped speculating like this.
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I pulled the notepad toward me to begin drafting my letter to Tommy. But before I could write anything the phone rang.
“I’m sorry I sent you away so abruptly,” I heard Shotgun say,
“it was just getting to be more than I could handle but I think I’m okay now.Why don’t you come back and I’ll make us a late lunch, then maybe we can have another session and I can tell you about Angie. If you’re up for it, that is?”
I said “Yes, that’s fine,” flung on some jeans, and made a mad dash in the Jeep to the supermarket where Franny had told me to go to stock up on some provisions. I decided to play it safe and bought a large quantity of things like toilet tissue, paper towels, and dishwasher detergent, on the assumption that my work with Shotgun would keep me at the cabin for the long haul.
The massive front door to Mallaby was ajar when I arrived and I found Shotgun padding about the kitchen in shorts, a tee, and bare feet.
“I’m making us an onion tart,” he said by way of greeting.
“How impressive,” I said. And it was. The effort he was making for me at any rate, not to mention the fact that he appeared to be a dab hand in the kitchen.
“Not really.” He gestured to a large skillet on the hob. “Just onions softened in butter and then I’ll add some eggs and some grated Gruyère and we’ll be laughing.”
“No, it’s the pastry that’s earned my respect.” I pointed to the empty pastry case.
“Oh, I cheat,” he said. “It’s frozen. Would you like to wash a lettuce for me and toss a salad?”
As we ate, perched on high stools at the counter, I told him about Bettina’s notes.
“Did you know Angie was in touch with Sean?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. In fact he didn’t say anything until I told
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him that Bettina had noted her meeting with him on the night Sean was killed.
“Maybe I should have seen her,” he said suddenly. “Sean set it up. He wanted me to see her, became quite obsessed about it, I don’t know why.”
“So you knew he was talking to her?”
“Well, obviously. He was going to New York but he told me it was all arranged. She’d be coming here around seven thirty that night.”
“But he didn’t know you canceled her?”
“Sean? No, I don’t see how he could have unless she told him.
I didn’t even know when he was due back.”
When I remembered the next note— Sean says Shotgun did kill groupie in London—I lost my nerve. I couldn’t ask him that straight out. Not yet. Instead I said: “There’s a note that says you and Sean were in the woods together the night before Sean was killed.”
He looked at me, bewildered.
“Now you’re talking nonsense. Sorry, but you are. I wasn’t even here the night before Sean was killed. That was a Thursday, right? I was in Connecticut. I drove to the North Shore on the Monday, took the ferry from Orient Point to New London. I didn’t get back till Friday morning.”
“What were you doing in Connecticut?”
He stared at me for a second. “All these questions. Not working for Evan Morrison by any chance, are you?
I went through all of this the first time he interviewed me. I was visiting a guy I know who’s written some pretty good songs. We were working on them together. There’s just a chance—and I don’t want this going in the book until I’m good and ready—there’s just a chance that I may get back to recording.”
He cleared my plate away and stacked it in the dishwasher.
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“So I wasn’t in the woods with Sean. Not exactly something we did together, go for father-son walks. Not our style at all. So I’ll make us some coffee and then we’ll get started, right?”
I had wanted to ask him who M might be but he had made it clear he didn’t want to dwell on Bettina’s notes anymore. I found this strange considering he wanted so badly to find out who had killed his son. I followed him into the little library and we resumed our positions on the sofa.
“So, Angie.”
He had begun talking—eyes closed, seemingly off in another world—before I’d barely got the tape recorder set up.
“Actually I met her for the first time when I was about twelve.
She was the daughter of Jack Braithwaite and if ever a man was anathema to my parents it was he. He was a mill owner, Jack Braithwaite, and he had brass, lots of brass, but it was totally un-acceptable to my parents because it was new money.
“I’ll never forget the one and only time my parents went to the Braithwaites whose house was brand-new and built specially for them. I have to admit it was a monstrosity—red brick, mul-tiple garages, a swimming pool—a real eyesore that didn’t sit at all well with the harshness of the moors. But it was spotless and it was warm because it had central heating, something I’d never encountered before. The living room had wall-to-wall shag carpeting and a coffee table. Well, it was too much for my parents.
They never accepted another invitation. My mother dismissed them as nouveau riche when we were only five minutes out the door and we rushed home to embrace the freezing cold dilapidated chaos that was Mallaby, stinking of dogs and my father’s whiskey fumes and held captive to the vagaries of outdated and malfunctioning plumbing.”
I sat there beside him thinking that nowadays we looked back to the precomputer age and thought that was barbaric. I found it
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truly amazing to think that people like Shotgun—and indeed my parents, inhabitants of the twenty-first century like myself—had spent a large part of their lives without any of the appliances and modern conveniences that we take for granted today.
Shotgun downed a glass of water and closed his eyes again.
“But when I was about fourteen I learned of the existence of the guitar and then there was no stopping me. Once I escaped from the confines of Mallaby and went down south to school, I managed to save up my pocket money and buy a little turntable of my own. Then at Harrow I applied for guitar lessons and I lucked into a teacher who was a closet blues fanatic. He introduced me to Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. I did the unthinkable as far as my parents were concerned. I sold a Parker pen they had given me for my birthday for twenty pounds, a massive amount of money in those days, and with it I bought myself a Spanish acoustic guitar and a little transistor radio. The good thing about Mallaby was that it was so vast that no one could hear the agoniz-ing guitar practice going on in my room and the stone walls were so thick they masked the rock ’n’ roll blasting out of the radio.
Even when I had it at full volume, which I frequently did.
“Jack Braithwaite had big plans for Angie. He was determined to spend a large part of his money launching her into society. She was sent off to do the debutante season and during the course of it, as she would later tell me, our paths crossed several times. As the only son of good Yorkshire stock and landowners to boot I was prime husband material. But I wasn’t your basic chinless wonder like a lot of my peers. I was a rough diamond in many ways and not just in my looks.”
I sneaked a quick glance at him. He wasn’t chinless by any means but there was nothing rough about his looks either as far as I could see. Indeed the most striking thing about his face were his fine patrician features. In many ways he was a dead ringer for
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the image of Andrew Jackson that I looked at every time I took out a twenty-dollar bill.
“Essentially, I was bored by the season. It was a round of endless parties at various estates all over the country. But I overrode my parents’ disapproval and went to Jack Braithwaite’s dance for Angie in Yorkshire.
“Two things made me fall in love with her. Jack Braithwaite’s money paid for a London group to come up and play in the disco, you know, with amps and a PA, and everything was miked up including the drums. The sound was so loud it was like being at a rock concert. Most deb dances had some local band who couldn’t be heard above all the Hooray Henrys and Henriettas braying at each other. A member of the band had a Gibson electric guitar and he let me have a go on it. I was in heaven and so high that I went straight up to Angie and asked her to dance and as I did so, they turned the lights down low and the band started playing ‘On Broadway,’ the Drifters hit.
“I held her very close and she began to sing in my ear—‘They say the neon lights are bright’—and I joined in with ‘on Broadway’ and what can I tell you? We clicked. She was this voluptuous warm armful. For the whole season I’d been dancing with callow girls and suddenly here was someone who felt like a woman. She had big tits and they pressed against my chest and I thought I was going to go wild.”
Suddenly he sat up straight and turned to face me on the sofa.
“What you have to understand, Lee, is that in those days nice girls didn’t. You couldn’t expect to have sex with your well-brought-up girlfriend—or even your fiancée—before marriage.”
“You didn’t get laid until—” I said without thinking and then blushed.
“Of course I did.” He laughed. “There were plenty of girls who weren’t ‘nice.’ But Angie was different. She was a virgin and
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she wouldn’t do more than kiss me. When I finally realized she was dead serious it came as a big shock to find that I really respected her for it. Say what you will about antiquated sexual customs, I’m here to tell you that because I had to wait for Angie, I fell in love with her.”
“So she became your girlfriend?”
Now he looked uncomfortable. “Yes—and no.There’s no getting around it, I behaved like a shit towards her. I saw her on the quiet. I was part of a certain snobby set, the kids of friends of my parents, and they didn’t acknowledge Angie as one of them. On the one occasion I took her to Mallaby, my parents were so patronizing, I think I would have preferred it if they had snubbed her altogether rather than subject her to such humiliation. And she was intelligent enough to understand that she was not accepted. In fact she was as angry with her father for inflicting his own upwardly mobile aspirations on her as I was with my parents for their superior attitude towards her family.”
“So how did the two of you wind up together?”
He didn’t answer for a minute or two.Then he said quietly, “I wish I didn’t have to put this in the book but I know I have to. But I’m ashamed—ashamed that it took an act of hateful violence to bring me to my senses about Angie.”
He turned away from me as if he did not want to see my reaction to what he was about to say.
“The other young ‘bucks,’ as Jack Braithwaite called them, my so-called friends, had her marked as an easy lay. I knew they had no concrete proof of this because she was a virgin. But, for the simple reason that she was, in their eyes, common, they assumed she was there for the taking.They referred to her as a cheap ‘bint’
or a ‘fuckable little totty,’ aping the local Yorkshire idiom. They felt she wasn’t worthy of their respect and to my shame I never set them straight.
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“They drank a lot—we all did and of course I was only a year or so away from experimenting with a ton of drugs. According to one of them from whom I got the whole story later on, they were drinking heavily the night it happened, revving themselves up to the point where they were like the pack of hounds they followed when out hunting.They scented blood and there was no stopping them.
“Jack and Mother Braithwaite—as he always called her instead of Vera—were away in Leeds. Angie was home alone. She let them in when they rang the bell at ten o’clock at night. Why wouldn’t she? She knew them, they’d all come to her dance.
There were five of them and they took turns with her, on the dining room table, in the conservatory, upstairs in her bedroom. It was like some ghastly Yorkshire variation of the girl getting gang-raped by the high school football team. They all had her except for the one who told me all about it and he came clattering out of the closet as soon as it became legal in 1967.
“She managed to get to the phone at some point and she called me and I went over there like a shot. I’d never had a boxing lesson in my life but I landed a couple of near lethal uppercuts and put at least two of them in hospital. I found myself to be capable of a violence I never knew existed within me.”
He shook himself a little and turned back to me with an almost embarrassed smile.
“So there you have it, the story of Kip and Angie, part one.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, we took off ”—he shrugged—“don’t ask me why. It just never occurred to us to do anything else. One of those monsters must have got it together to call an ambulance after we left but they kept quiet about what actually happened because no one ever came after me about it.”
“What about Angie? Didn’t she need to see a doctor?”
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“We went to Mallaby, picked up a few things, and then we drove through the night to London, stopping at a hospital in Leicester so she could be treated.We had no intention of ever returning to Yorkshire.”
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