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

by Geoffrey West

  Shelly came into the room and gave me an opened bottle of wine and a glass and left me alone while she changed. I heard her talking on the phone, and I admit I listened as she walked past the door. I heard a few quiet ‘Blimeys?’ and ‘What you reckon thens?’ And had that lonely feeling you get when you’re shut out of a conversation, that reminder that you’re an irrelevance to someone’s life.

  She came back and lit some candles on the far side of the room, turning off the main light, so that the area took on a companionable, shadow-filled cosiness. Then she left again and returned with scrambled eggs on a tray. She’d changed to a white tee shirt and short black skirt. She went out once more and came back with a second bottle of wine, and she refilled our glasses. Again I noticed the telltale scar on the inside of her wrist. Pale raised striations against the brown skin.

  “What a crazy situation,” she began, sitting down on the sofa beside me and drinking some wine. Her behaviour seemed oddly disjointed, erratic, and I guessed this wasn’t the first alcohol she’d had since she’d come home. “When I first met you I just wanted you to disappear. Now you’re sitting on my sofa. Drinking my wine.”

  “Thanks for putting up with me. I know you’re busy, and I’m taking up your evening. You’ve been really kind.”

  She held up her hand. “No Jack, you don’t know me. One thing I’m not, is kind. Patient, hard working, generous to my friends maybe, but I’m no Florence Nightingale.” Her long thin fingers with the red-painted nails tugged at the ends of her hair, and for the first time I noticed that there were fine lines around her eyes. She lit a cigarette and took a drag, her eyes narrowing. She looked older than I’d previously thought, and I calculated that she would be in her mid thirties, about my own age. She’d told me she had been five when her parents were killed.

  “That hypnotism you were going to try,” she said. “How about now?”

  “Do you feel like it?”

  “Yeah. Now that it looks as if I was actually inside that house I can’t wait to know everything about what happened.”

  “Okay.”

  There’s a lot of nonsense talked about hypnosis, the main fallacy being that it always works. Sometimes – in fact often – it doesn’t. The truth is, some people can easily ‘go under’ and others can’t; similarly, some hypnotists are better than others. The key to it all is to get the person as relaxed as possible. And it’s not a trance they go into, which sounds like a kind of sleeping state, it’s not like that at all. In fact I’d prefer to call it a heightened sense of awareness, a lifting the lid on the recesses of the mind. I won’t go into the mechanics of it, suffice to say that after about a minute of gentle coaxing, Shelly seemed to respond.

  Sitting next to her, I was able to talk quietly, and help her to concentrate. Not long afterwards her eyes began to dilate, then closed with a vibratory motion.

  I was in.

  “Shelly, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah”

  “I want you to go back in time. You’re aged ten.”

  “Ten?” A sing song, dreamy voice, the pitch higher and with exaggerated clarity.

  “What can you see?”

  Silence. I wasn’t sure I was reaching her.

  “What can you smell?”

  “Stale milk.” Her lip turned up in disgust. “It’s yucky.”

  “Where are you?”

  “School. It’s lunch. I hate lunch.”

  “Is anyone with you, or are you on your own?”

  “There’s Janet. She’s pulling my hair. Get off me!”

  “Go back further, Shelly.”

  “Further?”

  “Can you remember your mummy?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Can you remember your mummy?”

  Still silence. And then, after a long time she spoke in a tiny, childlike voice.

  “My Mummy.”

  “Can you remember the last time you saw her? In the big house?”

  “Big house?” Behind the lids her eyes seemed to dilate more. “Mummy. WHERE ARE YOU? Everyone’s running. There’s fireworks. Screaming… Shouting. Someone’s pushing me. HELP! DON’T!” She screamed. She started to cry.

  It was a knife edge, she was clearly terrified. Should I end it now?

  “HELP! FALLING!”

  Too late. I had to run with it.

  “MUMMY? WHERE ARE YOU?”

  She was agitated, scared, reliving the anguish.

  “I’m falling. Falling down. Head hurts. There’s shouting and screaming and pushing. I’m calling for my mummy but no one answers. There’s a man. He’s kind. He’s bending down. Helping me to get away from the shouting and screaming. He’s pushing something into my hands. NO, help! I’M NOT GOING! DON’T PULL ME!” There was a silence. She screamed again.

  “We’re away from the bangs. In the big room. I’m dizzy. He’s opening a door. NO! DON’T!” She began to cry. “It’s dark. Can’t see. Falling. Falling down!” She was weeping hysterically now. “It hurts! Help me! It’s dark. I’m scared of the dark! HELP ME! HELP ME!”

  She cried for a long time, then, finally her sobs were less frequent. I waited until she was quiet, and settled.

  Carefully, using the techniques I’d been taught, I brought her back to the present. She opened her eyes and smiled. Blinked a few times. I took her pulse and it was almost back to normal. Her breathing seemed regular. Pupils returned to their usual size.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” she said.

  “It did. You said quite a few things.”

  “Did I? I thought I was asleep. It’s just nothing. A total blank.”

  I told her what she’d said. It fitted in reasonably well with what I’d already worked out, and it solved one more mystery: someone – the man she’d referred to presumably – had given her the camera and perhaps also the diary, and pushed her through the cellar door, to get her out of the way of danger. They’d left her there. The mystery then was, how had she left the Mansh afterwards? It looked as if no one would ever know the answer to that.

  We discussed it for quite a while, but when she agreed with me that it didn’t really add to our knowledge, she leaned across and took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lit up. Then she stared ahead, fingering the sleeve of her tee shirt. “Look – I hurt my arm today, I was moving one of the pictures at the gallery, and hit my elbow on the doorframe. God it hurt. And there’s a bruise.” She put the cigarette in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa, moodily prodding and poking at the small discolouration.

  Sucking on the cigarette again, she looked up, giving me a smile. “Things haven’t been easy for me recently. I told you I was busy all weekend because I wanted to keep up a front, you know, seem as If I’d got it all together, as if my life was on track. Truth is I’ve been working day and night on the pictures for the exhibition, and I’ve hardly drawn breath these past few weeks. Hardly seen my friends. And, God, there’ve been a lot of things happening. Can I tell you something, Jack?”

  I nodded. The hypnotism session had somehow released some barrier between us and I felt rested, relaxed for the first time that day. The wine was good, smooth and sweet.

  “I have lots of friends. I do. Lots and lots of friends. But no one who actually...” She frowned and looked down at the floor. “Sometimes I feel so alone I just don’t know where to turn. Sometimes I feel like... Sorry Jack,” She broke off for a moment. “Why am I rabbiting on like this? You don’t want to hear about my troubles. Are you married?”

  “I was.”

  “You got fed up with her?”

  “The other way around.”

  “Differences?”

  “Too many to ignore.”

  “Best to part then. Never waste your life on compromises. If a relationship isn’t working, can it, even if you gotta hurt someone. Cos, you know something?” her eyes narrowed as she stared through her exhaled smoke. “You can be dead scared of hurting someone, but people are always tougher than they look.” She swallowed the res
t of her wine and poured some more. “But I can see you wouldn’t hurt anyone if you could avoid it. You’re a decent person, Jack. Otherwise you wouldn’t have risked your own life to save that stranger on the train.”

  “Anyone would have done the same.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Some people took the opportunity to nick wallets and phones in the darkness, while others just thought about saving their own skins.”

  “It was just lucky I happened to be there.”

  “I only wish I could be as unselfish as you, helping a stranger like you did. I’m not like that at all. Sometimes I hate myself. I really hate the things I do, the way I behave. Can I tell you something, Jack? There’ve been some dark times in my life. Really dark times...”

  She didn’t go on, staring into the distance, a deep frown creasing her forehead, her eyes full of unhappy memories.

  “But you’re different, Jack. You were in a tight spot and risked your life to help someone. You did the right thing.”

  “Well...”

  The room was getting darker and she hadn’t switched on the light, adding to the brooding, moody atmosphere and the tension between us. She said nothing for a long time, taking another drag on the cigarette, its tip glowing in the darkness. “Yeah, you did the right thing Jack. Tell me, have you ever done the wrong thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stared at the floor before meeting my eyes. “Done the wrong thing? Made the wrong decision?”

  “Yes I have.”

  “Tell me.”

  I thought for a while, aware that the wine I’d drunk earlier in the evening was releasing my inhibitions. “I killed someone.”

  Chapter 3

  DANGEROUS LIAISON

  “You killed someone?” she repeated, staring at me.

  “It was winter. I was driving on a dual carriageway, late at night. I did a lot of driving late at night in those days, I found it helped me to think, it was a way of clearing my mind. Although there was a bit of snow and ice the road conditions weren’t too bad. I wasn’t speeding, just jogging along, my mind in neutral, thinking about something else, listening to the radio with half my attention. Suddenly the car in front went into a skid. It slithered to the right, out of the way, then, straight in front of me was a man standing in the middle of the road. I saw his face, his eyes looking straight into mine for that split second, and, although I tried to stop and to swerve out of the way, I couldn’t, because I was locked into a skid myself. I ploughed straight into him, the car out of control. I still remember the soft crunching sound as his body smashed against the windscreen, the broken glass showering onto my face. When we came to a standstill he was still staring at me, his eyes wide open so close to mine, the radio blaring out Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. I’ve hated that record ever since. You know something? Nobody tells you that thing about a dead person’s eyes. They glaze over the moment they’re gone, they’re empty, just like fishes’ eyes on a slab. But when I first looked into his staring wide eyes, I reckon he was still alive, because there was something there, you know? As if he was clinging to those last seconds of his life and asking: Why me? Why did you kill me? Why didn’t you stop? Then they frosted over, with that awful chilling blankness. And I knew he was gone. I’ll never forget his name. Martin Gallica.”

  “What happened next?”

  I shrugged. “Police came, there was a massive investigation, and at the inquest I was exonerated. It turned out that the poor bugger had been high on cocaine and had wandered out into the road, that’s why the car in front skidded to avoid him, leaving the way clear for me.”

  “So no one blamed you?”

  “But I blamed myself. What I never told anyone was, just before it happened, my mind was off the road for an instant while I was retuning the radio. I always wonder what might have happened if I’d been just that tiny bit more alert, if I could have reacted one microsecond faster. I retuned the radio, killed a man, and all to get Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference. But maybe I could have swerved a fraction earlier, just done something to minimise the impact. I don’t know.”

  “You could have crippled him so badly he’d rather have been dead.”

  “True.”

  “Have you always been a writer?”

  “Oh no. This is all new to me. I’m a psychologist, with a degree in criminology. I used to be a Behavioural Investigative Adviser to the police – the old name for the job was a criminal profiler.”

  “A real life Cracker?”

  I flinched. “TV series’s like that have denigrated the profession. They’re almost an embarrassment.”

  “Don’t you do that kind of work anymore?”

  “No. I had to give it up, temporarily I hope.”

  “Why?”

  I told her about losing my ACPO approved status and how I was aiming to get it back one day.

  “So tell me about this Edward Van Meer. What actually happened?”

  I frowned at the memory, hating to dredge into the depths of my darkest times like this, but it was too late to turn back. “We knew he was our killer and were trying to find him. I had a feeling I knew where he was. But it was just a hunch really, nothing definite. I’d already made a fool of myself with the Senior Investigating Officer on the case – DCI Harcourt, a big angry Geordie who’d made no secret of the fact that he thought I was slightly less useful than a chocolate truncheon. So rather than invite another brush off, I decided to go to the place myself to investigate, something I shouldn’t have done on my own. I did inform them of where I was going, I left them a phone message but there was some kind of mix-up and they never received it – and nobody believed I’d done it. I didn’t wait for backup as I should have done, there wasn’t time, and I thought when they got my message they’d arrive. When I got there – it was a flat in a rundown part of Bristol – everything was in darkness. I pushed the door open and there was nothing, no sound, you know? I tiptoed up the stairs. When I reached the top, he got me, knocked me unconscious with a hammer. When I woke up I was tied to an upright kitchen chair, and the mother and daughter, whose home it was, were both tied to chairs too, only they were both slumped down, completely drenched in blood. When I looked closer I could see that he’d cut their throats. Even now, thinking about all the blood makes me want to retch. Then Van Meer held the bloodstained knife against my throat and sliced very very gently, very very slowly. I didn’t feel the blade cut my flesh, but I knew I wouldn’t at first. I knew that I’d feel nothing for the first seconds, then the panic and the pain would hit me as the blood started to spurt...”

  Shelly’s eyes were fixed on my face, the cigarette in her fingers, burning unnoticed and forgotten. “Go on.”

  “After that he had the idea of playing Russian Roulette. He made me watch him load a single round into a rusty old revolver, then he span the barrel. And stuck the end into my mouth and pulled the trigger. He did that five times over the course of the next 24 hours. Eventually the police came. I was rescued.

  “Everything was fine at first. I was debriefed, spoke to the psychiatrist, everyone reassuring me that the women were dead before I’d arrived, there was nothing I could have done. I knew the drill, you see, I knew the catchphrases, the theory. But the theory means jack shit when you’re up against the fear of death for 48 hours...

  “I was off work for a couple of weeks, got a dressing down for my mistake: not waiting for backup, but oddly enough I thought I was okay, you know? Beginning to put it all behind me, or so I thought. But one day I woke up and I felt weird. I couldn’t think properly. I couldn’t concentrate, and I had no energy, I could barely even eat. It was the start of my breakdown. My wife left me. A lot of things were going wrong in my life all at the same time.” I thought of the rows with my neighbour, the fight with the stranger at the pub, the gang of thugs I’d provoked, who’d nearly killed me.

  “Did you go to a hospital?”

  “They called it a clinic.
St Michael’s, an old Victorian building that used to be the county asylum. Six months of living hell, psychiatrists continually asking me questions, long echoing corridors, the shrieks and yells of the other inmates, the sheer bloody hopelessness of it all. I only really recovered once they let me out, and I stopped taking the damned drugs.”

  She stared at me. “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, for a while when I was in there, I managed to convince myself that I was a killer. I don’t know what the hell was going on in my head. I was convinced that because I’d killed a man, I might kill someone else. And that because I’d killed a man I deserved to die, that Van Meer should have killed me, that I had no right to be alive. And sometimes I was convinced I’d caught some killing desire from Van Meer. I couldn’t stop seeing his mad eyes, or hearing his laugh. I thought that I kept seeing him there, in the hospital. I sometimes think I see him following me, even now. And I know that’s impossible.”

  “Pretty heavy.”

  There was a long silence and I listened to the ponderous tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner.

  “Your turn, Shelly,” I prompted her. “Are you married?”

  “A long time ago. What a tragedy that turned out to be.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Until recently. But it wasn’t working out. That’s one of the reasons why...” She stopped talking, staring at the striations on her wrist.

  “But you must be a very successful artist. This house. The car.” I remembered the new Audi she’d driven me home in.

  She shook her head, dismissing her achievements. “I get so scared Jack. Sometimes I get so scared. Please, will you do something for me?”

  “What?”

  Outside the remains of daylight had disappeared, and the only illumination was the flicker of the candles on the far side of the room casting rippling shadows across her face.

  “Hold me. Just hold me in your arms.”