‘So it is,’ I agreed. ‘Are you still friends with Chester?’
He snorted. ‘That arsehole?’
I guessed he wasn’t. ‘So what do you know about the Belle Vue?’
He shrugged. ‘Big hotel run by the Burns family for years. It fell over the cliff,’ he said, taking a swig from the bottle. Something told me he was glad it went over the edge.
‘You used to do the odd-bit of work for Mr and Mrs Burns, that right?’
‘Yeah. Helped pay the bills.’ He frowned. ‘Why all this interest in the Belle Vue? There’s nothing interesting in that. That’s all dead and gone now. Dead, gone and forgotten.’ He faced me with icy resolve and I knew I would not get anything further out of him regarding the hotel.
‘People say Mr and Mrs Burns were nice folk,’ I said, trying to mollify things a little.’
‘Nice?’ he glugged down more beer, swiped a hand across his wet lips. ‘You believe what you want to believe.’
‘They weren’t, then?’
He pointed the bottle at me. ‘Look, talking about my band’s one thing; talking about those…’ He trailed off, the full stop to his unfinished sentence being the bottle placed to his lips again. He drained it and burped. ‘I think you ought to be going now,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
He grabbed hold of my untouched beer and took it away before I could say another word. I heard him plonking it down on the worktop. ‘I think the body of the woman had been buried near the location of the Belle Vue,’ I said. I heard it go quiet in the kitchen. ‘Mr Jacobs?’
He came back into the living room. ‘Forget the Belle Vue,’ he said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s all a coincidence.’
‘So where was the location of your caravan, Mr Jacobs, in relation to the hotel?’
His face coloured. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘I’m trying to picture things in my head, that’s all. Get an idea what things were like before the landslide.’
‘I told you to forget the bloody Belle Vue!’ he said, taking a step towards me. I was genuinely concerned at that moment. He looked angry enough to throttle me. Somehow he managed to control his temper and waved for me to go. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ he said. ‘You’re taking up my time.’
I rose uncertainly, backed towards the door. I thanked him for my beer. ‘Thanks for your time, Mr Jacobs,’ I said as I stepped onto the path outside. The door slammed in my face, the letterbox rattling. A cold gust of wind slapped my face as if I’d been an errant child.
I wondered at the man’s sudden changes in mood. What on earth was going on there? Was he simply being cantankerous? I doubted it. I detected something else. Something he was afraid of. Maybe even hiding from. Perhaps both.
It was as I drove back home that something began to niggle me.
The name of Steely Jacobs’ band, The Hangdogs. It sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t place exactly where I’d first heard about the group. I sat for a long while trying to beat my brains into giving up the information, like it was an itch it was impossible to scratch. When it finally came to me I couldn’t believe it.
So I cranked up the laptop and brought up the details on the Reading Rock Festival of 1978, the one Madeline had attended, leaving the ticket stub in her coat pocket to be found beside her murdered body. I scanned through the various festival posters.
I gasped when I came across one of the smaller, lesser-known supporting groups that played at Reading that weekend long ago.
It was The Hangdogs.
12
Chester Lee Holberg
You’d think someone with a name like Chester Lee Holberg would be easy to find. But there was no reference to anyone with that name on any of my internet searches, nothing on any social media sites either.
Next I focussed my attention on the city of Bristol, where Steely Jacobs said he’d first met Chester. I discovered the name of a woman whose middle name was Holberg and managed to find a number for her. It was a long shot, but I had little else to go on, so I rang her up.
‘Chester?’ said a woman’s strident voice at the other end of the phone. ‘What the hell has he done now?’
I assured her he hadn’t done anything, at least as far as I was aware. ‘I’d like to meet up with him, if I can,’ I said.
‘Are you from the Social Security?’
‘No.’
‘The Inland Revenue?’
‘No.’
‘The council?’
‘I’m from none of those,’ I said quickly, interrupting her list. ‘I’m just someone who’s interested in hearing about a band he used to be in during the 60s and 70s. The Hangdogs?’
There was silence. The sound of breathing into the mouthpiece. ‘Why?’
‘Are you his sister?’ I asked tentatively.
‘I’m his daughter. He hasn’t got a sister. Are you after money? Because if you are you’re on a hiding to nothing. My dad has sod all and he’s always had sod all. Whatever he gets he spends on booze and drugs.’
‘I’m not after money. Do you have an address where I can find him?’
‘You think I’m going to give someone I don’t know his address over the phone? I hear about people like you every day on the telly. You’ll be stealing his identity and draining his bank account next.’
‘You said he didn’t have any money.’
‘If he had money you’d drain it.’
‘Maybe we could meet up?’ I suggested.
‘So now you’re after my money?’
‘I’m after no one’s money,’ I said, shaking my head in frustration. ‘But I’ll pay you money if you tell me where he lives.’
Silence again. Her mind ticking over. ‘How much?’
‘Twenty,’ I said.
‘Thirty,’ she returned.
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Deal,’ she said.
She gave me her address in Bristol and we agreed to meet up the following day.
What exactly I was doing, I’d no idea. Tracing people and making cash deals over a phone in exchange for information was all pretty new to me. I felt like a character in one of my trashy, second-hand crime novels that never seem to sell and sit on my shelves like permanent fixtures. And for a man in my precarious financial situation, twenty-five pounds was a big deal. I began to have second doubts about what I was doing. I realised I was becoming overly suspicious of everyone lately, a squatter-like trait that had crept up on me unawares and was in danger of setting up home permanently. And another thing; I wasn’t a damn police officer. It was their job, after all, not mine, to bring murderers to book.
Madeline’s sorrowful face came to mind and refused to go away, and I knew I had no choice. So I drove to Bristol the next day, not sure where this was leading or whether it was a dead end and I’d finish up feeling foolish and out of pocket.
I parked on a steep hill in a long street of Victorian terraced houses. I could see Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge in the distance. I found the house I was looking for and knocked at the door. I heard a crying child from within. A woman opened the door, stared at me like I was an unexpected body growth. I saw the blur of a young child dashing down the hall behind her.
‘Are you him?’ she asked, looking me up and down. She was aged about thirty-five, forty, I guessed. Her eyes were tired and had dark shadows of worry beneath them.
‘I suppose I am him,’ I said.
She held out a piece of paper on which was scrawled an address. I took it. She kept her hand held out. I opened my wallet and slapped notes into her hand, at which she slammed the door in my face. I noticed a lot of people had started to slam doors in my face lately.
I sat in the car and entered the postcode into my sat nav. With a sigh I drove away, listening to the electronic voice of the woman with the faintly German-like accent guiding me through the sprawling, car choked maze that is Bristol. It brought me to a tall block of flats in a rundown part of the city. I found somewhere to park my car, an
d even though it was an old thing I was reluctant to leave it for fear of something happening to it. I took a stinking elevator to the flats on the fourth floor, glad it was no further and determined to take the stairs when it came to going back down. I exited the elevator holding my nose against the stench. I walked down the narrow walkway, each door looking exactly the same, save for a change in colour every now and again. There were occasional window boxes full of scraggy plants attempting to brighten up the place, but they didn’t work.
I knocked at the door and waited. And waited. I knocked again, louder this time.
‘What?’ someone hollered from inside, sounding very annoyed.
I called through the letterbox, ‘Hello, Mr Holberg – it’s OK, your daughter gave me your address.’
‘Why?’
‘I’d like to speak with you, if I can?’
‘Bugger off! I’m sleeping.’
‘It’s about The Hangdogs, Mr Holberg.’
I heard grunts, the scuffle of cloth against cloth, feet being dragged across a carpet. The sounds stopped on the other side of the door. I saw a murky shadow through the frosted glass pane of the door.
‘Are you after money?’ he said.
‘No, Mr Holberg.’
‘Are you from – ‘ he began.
I cut him off. ‘Nobody sent me, Mr Holberg, and I’m not after money.’
A key turned in the lock and the door swung open. ‘So who the hell are you? I’ve already had a woman come round here asking about The Hangdogs.’
Chester Lee Holberg, the man I imagined as a young rock an’ roll guitarist, was in fact a stick-thin man with a long face scored by deep-cut lines, and with baggy, excess skin that looked like his face had once been very fat and lost weight. His teeth, which he bared in a sort of suspicious grimace, were uneven and yellowed by nicotine. His eyes were small and set close together above a bulbous red nose that looked like some kind of poisonous fungus. The smell coming from his dishevelled, slept-in clothes was as bad as that from the elevator.
‘I don’t know about any woman, Mr Holberg. Who was she?’
‘I dunno, do I?’ he fired. ‘Young, dark-haired. I told her to bugger off. Like I’m telling you.’
‘My name is Toby Turner,’ I persisted. ‘I own a bookshop in Lyme Regis…’
‘A bookshop in where?’ he said, totally confused. ‘I don’t want any bloody books.’
He was about to slam yet another door in my face when I put my foot in the crack. The door met my instep with such force I yelped out. It wasn’t like that in the movies, I thought.
‘Jesus, Mr Holberg, was there any need to slam it so damn hard? I’m not selling double glazing or anything.’
‘I didn’t ask you to put your foot in there, you moron.’
‘I just wanted to talk to you about The Hangdogs.’
‘Maybe I don’t want to talk about The Hangdogs,’ he said, his voice slurred.
‘I’ll pay you,’ I said impetuously.
‘How much?’
Here we go again, I thought. ‘I don’t know. How much will it cost me?’
‘Give me ten and I’ll tell you about The Hangdogs.’
As parting with money for information was concerned, that was a bargain, I thought. He let me inside and told me to make myself comfortable, which was a near impossibility in a house that can only be described as ten times worse than Steely Jacobs’ place. What is it with ex-musicians and living in filth?
‘Why didn’t you talk to the woman, whoever she was?’ I asked.
‘She looked like a reporter. I hate bloody reporters.’
‘And I don’t look like a reporter?’
‘You look like a nerd,’ he said. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken,’ I said, feeling offended. He waited till I handed over the money. ‘I’m sorry it’s in loose change,’ I said, giving him a handful of coins. Next time I’d be better prepared, I thought. It didn’t do my credibility any good handing over loose change in that kind of situation. Mind you, looking at the state of the man, his body desiccated by years of neglect and abuse, I doubted it mattered to him one jot how his money came.
He put the money onto a sideboard and went to stand in front of the window, turning to face me. Behind him I could see the rooftops of the city stretching away, the Bristol Channel looking like a grey smudge in the hazy distance.
‘So what do you want to know?’ he said.
There was something about his expression that said he wasn’t really here in this room talking to me. Perhaps his addled brain thought I was part of a dream, or a nightmare. How sad, I thought, that everyone starts off with such huge potential and yet…
But that’s not true, I thought. Not everyone has had the same chances I had; a loving family, a good education. And not everyone takes those chances even if they had them. I felt quite saddened how that vast potential is so easily squandered as we try to carve out our muddled lives in the best way we can. How could a man with musical talent throw it all away, I mused? Could I eventually become someone like this?
I thought about my obsession with Madeline and realised I wasn’t so far away from Chester Lee Holberg standing before me like a ruined tower in an overgrown wasteland. An obsession, an addiction, can take many forms. And it can ruin a man in many different ways.
I shuddered.
‘I spoke recently to Steely Jacobs about the band,’ I put forward hesitantly. ‘That’s how I know about you.’
Chester eyed me, his head wobbling slightly. I noticed one hand had an uncontrollable tremor, the other fixed like a claw. ‘It was good in the early days. Steely and me. We were gonna go far. We had big plans.’ He raised his hand, a vague signal for me to stay where I was. He wandered away to one of the bedrooms. I saw him through the open doorway, pushing black bin bags out of the way of a bedside unit. He looked in the cupboard for something. He returned a few moments later with a small photograph album, its red leather cover marked and greasy. He sat beside me on the sofa and flicked the book open. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘1974.’
The photograph was losing its colour to an overall brown wash. I would never have said the man in the photo was Chester. He was young, slim, wore a wide-lapelled cream shirt and flared jeans. He had a massive head of curly brown hair and a handlebar moustache. He was, surprisingly, quite handsome. ‘That’s outside a club in Derby,’ he said. He turned the page. ‘That’s the band,’ he said, stabbing a finger onto another photo of four young men lined up against a brick wall. ‘That’s Steely Jacobs. The one with the steel guitar.’
Steely was indeed a good looking man and I said so. Chester turned the page. More photos of the band. Obviously it meant something to Chester to have kept them so long. ‘So you enjoyed being in The Hangdogs, Chester?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Great days.’ He didn’t elucidate. His eyes were watering, not because of emotion, but because it seemed he just couldn’t keep them open.
‘You played Reading Rock Festival in 1978, is that true?’
‘Sure we did. Best thing we ever did. Thought that was our big break and would make us. It didn’t. It finished us.’
‘Why was that?’ He ignored me and flipped more pages. I got him to stop at one in particular. ‘That’s Steely outside his caravan, right?’
‘Yeah. He had this old thing parked in a field near some hotel or other. It’s where he used to take his bints.’
‘Bints?’
‘You know, bits of skirt, tarts. He used to call it his love shack.’
‘Were there many women?’
‘Sure. There were always lots of young girls hanging around backstage. Steely being so good looking they’d buzz around him like flies around shit. He always got the best ones.’
‘And some of them he’d take back to his caravan in Dorset?’
‘Some of them, yeah.’ Chester’s voice had dropped a tone.
‘Can you remember a woman called Madeline?’ I ventured.
He looked at me like I’d lost
the plot or something. ‘We never asked their names. It wasn’t like that. It was just sex. That’s the kind of thing we did back then. You never asked names.’
‘Did you ever take girls back to his caravan with him?’
‘No. That was his place, his private space. We stayed in it a couple of times, but just the boys, never with girls.’
‘Steely and you don’t talk now, that’s what he said.’
‘We don’t talk,’ said Chester. He slammed the photo album closed. ‘He screwed things up real bad for us.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know, man; it’s been so long ago now. Things like that ought to be left alone.’
‘Things like what, Chester?’
‘I found out and I told him; I told him screwing them was one thing, but that other thing was taking it too far…’
‘What other thing?’
‘A lot of those girls, they had nothing. Some of them didn’t even have proper homes. They were looking for love, someone to care for them. Kids really. Nothing more than kids fresh out of school. Some of them still at school but acting much older. We thought they were meat. They weren’t going to get any love. That was bollocks. But some of them were so desperate they’d do anything to get attention. And Steely, well he was a catch, a guitarist in a rock band, good looking like Burt Reynolds, they’d get wet just looking at him.’
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 30
