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

by Geoffrey West

  I sighed, blind fury making my words over enunciated, coldly incisive: “Edward Van Meer is an extremely intelligent man. Why else do you think it took the police so long to catch him? How else do you think he managed to draw so many victims into his snares? You surely know that many people thought Harold Shipman was a wonderful, lovable, kindly hero before his crimes were made public. The killer Fred West was apparently great company – a joker, a man who always had a friendly smile for everyone, women actually enjoyed flirting with him. And Edward Van Meer is every bit the endearing middle-aged widower. He’s a brilliant actor. You must realise that he is one of the most sinister, textbook examples of a psychopath you’re ever likely to come across! He murders people because he enjoys doing it. He derives pleasure from their pain.”

  She said nothing for a long time, and I almost wondered if she’d hung up. “That may be true. But there’s only one tactic I can think of to try and prove it one way or another.”

  “Which is?”

  She paused, and she stuttered as she rushed on. “I–I know it’s an awful lot to ask of you Dr Lockwood, but I c-can’t think of any other way. You’re a highly qu-qualified B-Behavioural Investigative Adviser who was nearly tortured to death by a psychopath. That’s an extraordinarily rare scenario. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s probably never happened before, and it’s a fantastic opportunity for totally original research which couldn’t be done in any other way. You must have been able to read his expressions, get a grasp of what motivated him. And now you’re in a unique position of knowing precisely what sort of questions to ask him now, and making empirical judgments about whether or not he’s telling us the truth. You could ask him the kind of questions that no one else could.”

  “You want me to prepare questions for you to ask?”

  “No, not that.”

  “What then?”

  “This is difficult. And I’m not expecting an immediate answer.” She paused. “Thing is, I–I wondered if you would consider coming with me to meet him.”

  “Meet him?”

  “I’m sure you’re very busy,” she rushed on, “so of course I’d fit in with any timescale at all that suits you. Before you decide, let me explain that Edward’s been in Broadmoor in solitary confinement for nearly two years now. The clinicians tell me he’s changed in a number of ways. His abnormally high sex drive is being controlled by medication, as are his wildly unpredictable mood swings. He’s even asked if he could start associating with some of the other prisoners. The priest there says he’s converted to Catholicism and spends a lot of time in the chapel, praying for forgiveness.”

  “Really.”

  “Will you help me Dr Lockwood? I wouldn’t ask if I could think of any other way. None of his other victims are alive. And he needs to meet one of his victims, to confront what he’s done. That’s the only thing that’s going to break down his barriers. If you would let me try to arrange for permission for you to come with me when I next meet him, and he could see you and talk to you–”

  “Melanie, stop please! Just stop.”

  “Sorry.”

  There was a long silence.

  “What you’re asking of me is completely out of the question. If I ever set eyes on Edward Van Meer again, I don’t think I could stop myself physically attacking him. And once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I would probably kill him with my bare hands.”

  “Surely if–”

  “Melanie, listen, I believe that some people’s actions are so heinous that they forfeit their right to life.”

  “Surely you can’t think that?

  “They forfeit their right to breathe air!”

  “Will you at least think about it? Please, Dr Lockwood, it could make all the difference to me.”

  “I can’t. Melanie, I’m very sorry, but you’d have more chance of persuading a cancer patient to make friends with his tumour. I’ll help your work in any other way I can but this is something I just cannot do. Something I will not do.”

  There was silence on the line. “Oh, well, it’s more or less what I expected.”

  “I understand why you had to ask. But that’s the only answer I can give.”

  “Can I call you again in a few days? Perhaps when you’ve had some time to think about it you might reconsider?”

  “There’s no point. Goodbye Melanie, and good luck.”

  “But if you would just–”

  “Goodbye, Melanie.”

  * * * *

  On Monday morning a package arrived from Tony Woodley photographers, with my photos inside. Someone had found them after the underground fire and posted them to him, in the hope that with the serial number he could trace the owner. I phoned him to thank him.

  I’d done some checking, and what Shelly had told me was true. LoneWolf Productions had been Maggi O’Kane’s management company, and an internet check showed that in the last few years they’d grown exponentially and acquired all kinds of other businesses and now had offices in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. I phoned their London office and managed to fix an appointment to see one of the personnel directors in the afternoon. Driving seemed an easier option than the train, and I realised I’d have to leave more or less immediately to make it in time.

  The drive to London had been unpleasant, not least because Melanie Deeprose’s phone call kept preying on my mind. What’s more, my mobile was still switched off because of Shelly – last time I’d switched it on there were six more missed calls and a text saying: ring me please Jack! For God’s sake, what have I done to upset you? The thought of her fingers over mine, fastening them around her neck and begging me to squeeze made my flesh crawl.

  Surely, I reasoned, if I just didn’t answer her calls and texts she’d eventually get the message?

  And Edward Van Meer. Melanie’s reminder that the beast was still living and breathing somewhere was an offence against nature. Maybe the resurgence of the memory of my encounter with him was what gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was being followed. Waiting in the queue to buy a meal at Maidstone services I had that sixth sense that someone’s eyes were on me, yet when I turned round there was no one. By the time I’d pulled into the multi-storey NCP car park in South London, I’d managed to pull myself together enough to stop imagining things. Edward Van Meer was behind bars, and, according to the trial judge, it was unlikely he’d ever be released. He wouldn’t even be eligible for parole until 2050, by which time, if he was still living, he’d be 90.

  Peter Barclay’s modern office in Southwark was on the first floor of a grand glass-and-timber block, which had the name LONEWOLF HOUSE over the front entrance. Nearby I noticed the partly demolished ‘Southwark Towers’ office block, its site being prepared for the proposed ‘Shard’ building.

  After registering with the security guard at LONEWOLF HOUSE, I went up in the lift, reckoning that my casual jacket, jeans and trainers were compatible with the informality of the music business world. Peter turned out to be a sharp-suited man in his twenties with fashionably short, gelled-into-a-coxcomb hair, two silver rings in his left ear, and a brand of aftershave that filled the room. Peter stared at me intensely as I told him what had happened, but his attention was undivided, and, unlike Giles, he listened to what I had to say without interrupting.

  “Wow,” Peter Barclay said at last when I’d explained everything. “I really don’t know what to say. I don’t know if you’re aware, but it was my grandfather, James Claverhouse, who actually started LoneWolf in 1964. Unfortunately he died last year, otherwise he’d have been the one to talk to. Now let me have a think.”

  I took another sip of the strong black coffee that Peter had given me, giving him time to work out what to do.

  “I’ve got it! Bear with me, Jack, this is the guy we need.” He picked up the phone and dialled. “If Uncle Alfie doesn’t remember all about it, then no one...” He broke off when the line connected and spoke a few words before his face broadened into a smile. When he hung up, his smile was
wider still.

  “We’re in luck. Uncle Alfie only pops in once a month, but he’s here today, and we can go up and see him now.”

  The office we went up to in the lift was much larger than Peter’s had been, and the desk was bigger, there were large colourful oil paintings on the walls and a sumptuous grey carpet underfoot. Alfie Goldstein was a mountain of a man in an open-necked brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt, with a fringe of silver hair above a face that resembled a large white melon, the lips bulbous and blubbery.

  I explained the background and laid the photos out on the desk, and Alfie Goldstein put on some black-framed spectacles, tugged his lower lip, and picked them up one by one, scrutinising them carefully.

  He was frowning as he stared. “Maggi O’Kane. Old Maggi. Well well well.” After a long time he smiled, nodding, and snapping his finger and thumb together, the cracking sound oddly abrupt and jarring. “Got it! You know what these are, don’t you?”

  “Photos of a mass murder?”

  “That’s what they’re supposed to look like, sure...”

  The large man laid down the last photo, face-up with a flourish.

  “You do know you’ve made a prize tit of yourself mate.” An expression of malevolent delight lit up his pudding face. “Mass murder? These are just the stills for Assassination.”

  “Assassination?” Peter said, looking enquiringly at the older man, then at me.

  “Border Crossing’s album that never was! Don’t you know about it? Course Peter it was years before you were born.” His solicitous smile at Peter had no sarcastic edge until he turned to me. “But you, Jack, shame on you mate, didn’t you tell me you’d done your research on Maggi O’Kane’s music? You slipped up badly here and no mistake. Assassination was the famous ‘lost album’. Lots of bands have them, surely you knew that? The ‘Lost Album’ is a trade term for an album that threatens to become absolutely stratospheric, everyone in the business is geared up to rave about it, yet something happens that buggers it all up and the thing never gets made. The Lost Album. It’s a bit like the famous producer who’s going to make a world shattering film that gets the plug pulled at the last minute, or a successful writer who promises a blockbuster bestseller that doesn’t even get published. Assassination. Sure sign of disaster is the way that Maggi and the boys argued over it. They were wrangling with each other for weeks trying to sort out the album cover, when only a couple of the tracks were laid down. Jack, you must have come across Thumbelina and Come to me Gently – lovely raggety-taggety eight-bar blueses, the pair of them. Bit like her earlier edgy numbers: Speak to me Softly, Sun Rising, and the sensational All Night Chesbury. Border Crossing were supposed to be working on material in the studio, but nothing actually materialised, and then, right at the last moment, Maggi pulled the plug. It was, ‘I don’t like the songs, man, let’s think again.’ She reneged on the record contract, didn’t she? Fucked us all about. Her career never really recovered from it. If you ask me Maggi and Border Crossing had lost their ability to make hit records by that time. It sometimes happens. A band will make a few albums that are top rate, and then it’s as if they just can’t do it anymore. Nobody knows why, and it can be absolutely heartbreaking. Because the magic, the creative force or whatever it is has just gone and they can’t get it back. Maybe those burnt-out musicians get lazy, too easily satisfied, who knows? But Assassination marked the end of Maggi’s career, sure as eggs is eggs.”

  “They designed an album cover before making the album?”

  “Not an uncommon practice. Album covers were very important in those days, you see, they helped sell the records. Video promotions were in their very early days, the internet was decades into the future, and no iPods or MP3 players, even CDs hadn’t caught on. In them days it was mainly vinyl, sold in these quaint little old record shops on the high street. You needed to have an arresting album cover. Something that grabbed people’s attention, shocked them into looking. Remember Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club sleeve design? Very colourful and lively, with all the military uniforms, then there was Cream’s naked young girl – that caused a lot of controversy, as did Ozzy Osbourne’s black magic rubbish. For Maggi’s album Assassination, the idea was to have the image of the band members shot by an armed gang, that was the idea. ‘The day the music died’, you know, a kind of reference to American Pie, Don McLean’s classic number? ‘Death of the music’, a ‘Final blast of sound’, ‘Songs as you go into the Hereafter’ or some daft notion like that, was what Maggi was after. The artist designing the sleeve wanted some posed shots like this so he could have something to work on. They went to a lot of trouble as I remember – used stage blood, worked out how they were going to fall.”

  “Whose idea was it?” I asked.

  “Maggi’s I think.”

  “So isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that she has this idea for an album cover, and then actually enacts the same thing herself not long afterwards?”

  “Not at all, mate, least it doesn’t strike me that way,” Alfie said, picking up the photo and staring at it again. “On the contrary, it proves to me that the morbid concept of mass murder was already in her mind, just waiting to surface.”

  “But I researched Maggi’s musical career and no one ever mentioned Assassination.”

  “Then you didn’t research it properly, did you?” His expression lost any vestige of its previous warmth. “As far as I know, no one’s ever written her biography, so only old blokes like me who happened to be there at the time would know, wouldn’t they? You should have dug up some of the old boys and chatted us up, that’s how you guys can get the lowdown, people not books or the bloody internet. No mate, Assassination was chucked out after all the fanfare, at the last minute. Not altogether a bad thing in fact: the marketing people thought it wouldn’t work, and I think they were right. They were against the title and the concept from the start, but Maggi, she thought she knew best. That’s what she was like, old Maggi, a prima-fucking-donna who always got her own way.”

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “Didn’t like her or any of her half-arsed second-rate band.” Alfie Goldstein scowled, the massive brow erupting into deep furrows. “Just between you, him and the skirting board, I thought Maggi O’Kane was nothing but trouble. She had a vicious temper, she liked to bully people and she thought she was God’s gift. I was one of the roadies then, starting at the bottom of the business, working my way up, trying to get a feel of things before I went into management. She treated guys like me, who weren’t part of the glamorous rock scene, as if we were fucking muppets, just put there to pander to her every whim. I wasn’t the only one who reckoned she was a jumped up arsehole. Maggi had lots of enemies and lots of problems. Mental trouble for a start – she was seeing a shrink about depression. Her relationship with Alistair was on the rocks, and she’d started having a thing with someone else in the band, that bastard Ben Frensham. Ben was a nasty vicious little shit who used to do unmentionable things to the groupies who were unfortunate enough to go with him. Maggi couldn’t see it though, too obsessed with herself. She had a star-sized ego to match a minimal talent.”

  There was a long silence, as I absorbed the full import of what had been said.

  “Well Jack,” Peter interjected, cheerfully. “I think that answers all your questions, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I reluctantly agreed. “But if these were posed shots for a professional artist’s work, why would they be taken using an amateur box camera?”

  “Because an amateur took extra pictures I should think,” said Alfie, puffing out his rubbery lips. “Thought it would be a laugh to have his own snaps of the fun. Stood behind the professional who was actually taking the main shots.”

  I felt drained and exhausted. “Thanks, both of you.” I stood up, looking at Alfie finally. “Are you absolutely certain of this?”

  “I’m not just certain, mate, I was there!” Alfie assured me. “I was twenty, and the massacre hit me pretty hard, it was
one of my first experiences of death at first hand. It happened just like they said it did. Maggi O’Kane was a powder keg that happened to blow up on the 20th of December 1980. That’s it. End of story. Conspiracy theories? Cover ups? I ain’t got time for them myself. The Moon Landings never happened. The Twin Towers bombing was a put-up job by the US government to get public support for invading Iraq. It’s all a load of moonshine to sell books and newspapers.”

  We were standing now, Alfie Goldstein beaming and chuckling, enjoying my discomfort as he walked across the room and slammed the door in our faces.

  To his credit, Peter looked embarrassed and I warmed to him for not wallowing in my humiliation.

  “I’m very sorry Jack,” he said downstairs at his office door as we parted. “Uncle Alfie is a nice guy really, he doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “Forget about it. And thanks for helping me.”

  “I’m just glad we solved the mystery. Sorry you’ve had to come all this way, but at least now you can finish off the book without worrying about checking any more facts. If I can help you with anything else, just give me a call. And please, do send me a copy when the book comes out and I’ll get onto my press contacts to get you some reviews.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “That’s my business, Jack, that’s what I do best. I don’t have any creative talent myself, but I can recognise it in other people, and part of my job is to make the best use of people’s skills, I enjoy it. I reckon that if you’ve gone to all this effort for the sake of getting your facts right, your book’s been well researched and sounds like it’ll be a great read.”

  “Thanks Peter, I will.”

  * * * *

  Outside on the pavement the sun was shining, the day’s brightness in marked contrast to my mood. Alfie Goldstein’s put-downs had made me feel as if I was a schoolboy who’d had a rollicking from the headmaster. And it didn’t help that as I turned the corner I thought I caught a glimpse of Edward Van Meer. This time he was only there for a few moments, watching me, then he was gone. It sent a shockwave down my spine, as if, for a split second, he knew what had happened and was actually mocking me. Was I really losing my grip on reality?