What I was hearing was uncomfortable. I couldn’t get Madeline out of my mind. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘It wasn’t me, man. I was dead set against it when I found out about what he was doing in cahoots with those people, the ones who ran that hotel.’
‘The Belle Vue?’
‘That’s the one. Steely got himself mixed up in something real bad and I said I wasn’t having any of it, and he tells me we need the money. Our managers screwed us over, so we had nothing. Steely thought that if we cut a proper album, you know, get into a studio, we’d have something better to show the record companies, get us a contract. But hiring a studio and all that stuff to record an album would take a lot of money. It’s not like today, when kids can do it on their computer in their bedrooms. We didn’t have the money, and that’s why Steely got mixed up in it. But I say stuff the money if that’s what it’s come to. We had a huge row, I threatened to shop him if he didn’t see sense, and then the bastard beat me up. I ended up in hospital with a busted hand that meant I could never play in a band again.’ He held up his hand to show me. ‘See? I can’t move my fingers. He ruined my life, the sick bastard.’
I thought the lack of movement had been the effects of his drug addiction. I hadn’t realised. ‘So what had it come to, exactly? What was the argument about?’
‘Ever wondered how a man can afford to buy a house when he’s got no money? That’s what Steely did. Bought himself a big house. It was a payoff.’
‘For what?’
Chester’s eyes froze, like he suddenly remembered where he was and what he was saying. ‘For nothing. It was about nothing, man. It was about nothing.’
‘What were the Burnses doing, and what was Steely’s involvement in it?’
‘That’s it. I’ve finished talking things over. You’ve had your tenner’s worth. That’s all you’re getting. I can’t remember anything else.’
‘I’ll pay you more,’ I said. ‘How much? Twenty, thirty, fifty?’
‘keep your money. And forget what I said. I ain’t myself these days. My head’s all screwed. I say all sorts of crap.’
‘This is important, Chester,’ I begged. ‘You know something you’re not telling me.’
‘No shit,’ he said. ‘I may not have much of a life, but what I’ve got I aim to hold onto.’
‘Your life’s in danger?’
‘Man, if you dig around like this then your life will be in danger, too. Don’t screw around with things you know nothing about.’
‘I’ll go to the police.’
‘With what?’
‘With what went off at the caravan, at the Belle Vue.’
‘Nothing went off. And that’s what I’ll tell the police; that I never said anything about any hotel because I never set eyes on you. I told you nothing. Forget it, kid. They won’t listen to you telling them about something you found out from some old junkie off his head all the time, will they? They know me. They laugh at me. They think I’m a joke. Everyone thinks I’m a sick joke, so forget what I said. It won’t do you any good. Now get the hell out of here.’
‘I need to know…’ I said.
He staggered to the kitchen. I heard a drawer being opened and the rattle of cutlery. He came back a few seconds later armed with a very dangerous looking carving knife. ‘Get the hell out!’ he yelled.
I got the hell out. Fast.
13
Feeling Better About Things
She was undeniably beautiful. I ached inside just looking at her.
This can’t be right, I thought. But it felt right. Like you know eating a cream donut filled with fat and sugar is bad for your heart. This had to be bad for my heart, but it was just so good.
Madeline was sitting at my desk. Her head was bowed, as if scrutinising something on the desk, but there was nothing there.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m checking over the accounts.’ Her eyes played intently over the empty space in front of her.
‘So how am I doing?’
‘It’ll take a while, but things are looking up. You’ll break even by the end of this year and be into profit by the middle of next.’
Now I knew I was living some kind of internally generated fantasy. It was November and breaking even this year was never going to happen. In fact I was wondering whether I ought to wrap up the entire business. It was crippling me financially. I was getting further and further into debt. The arm of bankruptcy was waving me over. And with everything that was going on, my head was as screwed up as Chester Lee Holberg’s. Running a business at the same time as going loopy, losing your best friend and uncovering a murderer was a lot to handle. The only thing preventing me from even seriously considering closure at present was the fact that if I let the shop go I might be letting Madeline go as well. Almost as if she came with the fixtures and fittings. In spite of everything, that was something I just didn’t want to contemplate.
So I did the next best thing and closed the shop up and pulled down the blinds and hid inside my safe little bookish cocoon with only the spirit of a pretty dead woman for company. A pretty dead woman now examining my accounts and telling me things are going to be all right.
Gabrielle Norton came knocking one day. She called through the letterbox. I figured she knew I was there, sitting at my desk in the gloom, because she told me she was worried about me and that if I needed her to give her a bell. She went away eventually.
I thought a lot about Mark. I thought about the times we had together as kids, and how he was the only true friend I had in Dorset. In the world. Apart from Madeline, of course, but she wasn’t of this world so she didn’t count. I was worried for him. Maybe it was the similarities between what I’d seen at Mark’s house, the photos and names of those missing young girls, and what Chester told me about the groupies who hung around The Hangdogs all those years ago, but it set me to thinking about him. How he might be in trouble and need my help, not my condemnation. That’s what friends were for and in a way I’d abandoned him. I’d been too quick to throw some kind of blame at him without knowing the full details.
I needed to confront Steely Jacobs again, too. I knew that. Go to him with what Chester had told me, and force him to open up about what had been going on at the Belle Vue.
But could I rely on the word of a man like Chester? He admitted his head was screwed up bad. It looked pretty screwed from where I’d been sitting. Everything he told me that day could have been a narcotic-induced fantasy. He already thought he had reporters going round to his flat – a young, dark-haired woman. That could be pure fantasy, Chester trying to give his wasted life some kind of importance again. He might easily have told me he’d been visited by silver-suited aliens from Venus operating on him to take his sperm. People like that created all manner of alternative realities in which they were the centre of attention.
So was I doing just that? By seeing Madeline was I creating an alternative reality?
If so, then Gabrielle Norton was part of it.
And if so, was I enduring it like some kind of punished martyr, or enjoying it like self-flagellation?
Jesus, Toby, get a grip!
I left Madeline looking at my non-existent accounts books and decided to tackle things one at a time. I made a list. I’m good at lists. First on there was seeing Mark’s brother, Joseph. I wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to Mark and what was making him tick. I also needed to tell someone about what I saw at his flat. I needed to be convinced that Mark was OK and that I was worrying unduly and that as a friend I was supporting him in the best way I could.
The next thing on my list was visiting Steely Jacobs. That was going to be tough, because I’d no idea what to say really. I could see myself now. ‘Hi, Steely. I spoke to your ex-mate, you know, out-of-his-skull Chester Lee Holberg, and he told me you’d been involved in something decidedly sleazy and shady. Maybe even murder.’
Sure, like that was going to go down really well.
Sharon B
oothman was like a tonic for a fevered brow. She had a way about her that made you feel comfortable just by being with her. She’d make a great agony aunt, I thought. I liked Sharon. She’d only ever met me a couple of times since I’d been in Dorset, and I’d not seen her since our aborted dinner, but it was as if we’d been close friends for years. The Bay Hotel was quiet. Sharon told me there were only a small number of guests. But that was to be expected, she said with an air of optimism I wish I could bottle and use for myself.
Like I’ve said already, the hotel occupied a prime location, set back from the sheer yellow-coloured cliffs between West Bay and Burton Bradstock. Burton was a favourite haunt of mine. Unspoilt sands, a renowned restaurant close to the beach, a few guest houses, public loos, a car park and little else. You can walk all the way to Chesil Beach, that great natural spit of raised shingle that stretches for miles along the coast. People came here to get away from it all. And I guess that’s what I was doing.
‘You look very tired,’ Sharon said to me as we sat at the kitchen table. She’d paused between jobs to talk to me.
‘Have you seen Mark recently?’ I asked, skirting her observation. I was getting tired of people telling me I looked tired. I didn’t need to be told. I felt like shit most days now.
She shook her head. ‘I tried calling him but there was no answer.’
Joseph came into the room. ‘You can’t talk to him these days,’ he said sullenly. He wore a red Rolling Stones T-shirt, his hair no longer tied into a ponytail. I noticed it looked thin and dry. No longer young and vibrant. It didn’t suit being long, I thought. But maybe that was just me being a nerd, I thought, going back to what Chester told me. Days after the fact and it still rankled.
‘I don’t think Mark’s quite himself,’ I said.
‘Mark’s never been himself,’ said Joseph. He stood against the worktop and folded his arms.
‘Now be fair,’ said Sharon, ‘you don’t give him the chance.’
‘I gave him plenty of chances. The reason we don’t talk is down to him, not me. The man’s sick.’
‘You didn’t try the last time he was here,’ she said firmly.
‘I damn well did.’
‘Then you should have tried harder.’ A look passed between Sharon and her husband. He clamped his lips shut. Looked away. ‘I take it you’ve not heard from him either?’ she asked me.
‘I haven’t. But there again, I haven’t tried that hard. I really ought to. I’m getting worried about him.’
‘In what way?’ Sharon said.
I glanced from one to the other of them. Feeling under some kind of scrutiny. ‘I never knew about the death of the girl…’ I said.
‘Shit happens,’ said Joseph shortly.
‘He never got over it,’ I said. ‘That’s what I think. OK, so it was a long time ago, but it’s affected him deeply.’ I studied the tabletop. ‘He was acquitted, right?’ I said.
Sharon nodded. ‘That’s right. The evidence was circumstantial. The prosecution didn’t have a case against him and it fell through.’
‘Someone killed her,’ Joseph growled. Obviously the pain of it still bit deep.
‘Now then, Joe…’ said Sharon.
‘You still think it was Mark who killed her?’ I put forward.
‘I’m not saying I do, and I’m not saying I don’t,’ said Joseph flatly. ‘But until they find her killer then we don’t know one way or the other, do we?’
‘He’s your brother,’ I defended.
‘I loved her,’ Joseph returned. He glanced at Sharon. I expected her to react in some way to this, but she remained calm, as always.
I said, ‘Do you really think he’d be capable of doing something like that? I mean, he didn’t have a reason, did he? He loved her, too.’
‘So he says,’ said Joseph. ‘But what he calls love and what I call love are two different things. You don’t beat up your wife if you love her, do you?’
‘It was hardly a beating, Joe,’ said Sharon. ‘To be fair.’
‘The man hit his wife!’ he said.
‘Which is wrong, quite rightly so,’ said Sharon. ‘I can’t condone his actions. But he’s a man with issues. They bubbled over. He needs to seek some kind of help again.’
Again? I wondered what they meant.
‘Yeah, he’d better, before he does some poor woman some real harm,’ grumbled Joseph.
I coughed lightly, unsure if I should tell them what was on my mind or not.
‘What is it, Toby?’ Sharon probed.
‘Nothing.’
‘You came here for a reason, Toby, and not to hear what you’ve already heard. Do you want to get something off your chest?’
She had the kind of eyes that draws things out of you against your will. She was also good at using silence. The longer no one spoke the more I felt I ought to fill the gap.
‘I went round to Mark’s place. He called me, wanting to speak to me. He sounded pretty low.’
‘He’s always low,’ said Joseph. ‘It comes with the territory.’
‘Joe!’ Sharon admonished.
He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table opposite me. They both stared at me, waiting for me to go on.
‘When I got there he was blind drunk. I’ve never seen him in such a bad state before, and I’ve seen him drunk a few times. Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I cleaned him up and decided to stay the night to keep an eye on him. I happened to go into his study and I saw a file on his desk…’
Sharon cocked her head slightly. ‘A file?’
‘It contained photos of young women.’
‘What kind of photos?’ said Joseph, leaning closer to me.
‘Missing women.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Sharon.
‘They were mostly newspaper reports and things. But they went back years,’ I said.
‘Why would he want those?’ Joseph asked.
I shook my head. ‘That’s the thing, I don’t know. Has he ever done anything like that before, collected strange things?’
‘No,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s not in his nature. That’s why he’s so good at selling antiques. If he gets something special he doesn’t hang onto it for himself, he can sell it like it doesn’t matter. He’s never been a collector of anything that he feels he needs to keep. Like wives.’
‘Joe, that’s not fair,’ said Sharon.
‘That’s not the only thing…’ I said. I looked away from them. Somehow I felt I’d already betrayed Mark and was on the verge of compounding it. ‘There was a map on the wall. It had coloured pins stuck in it. They were mainly marking cities from all over the UK. Beside the pins were dates and words that didn’t appear to make sense.’
Joseph’s eyes looked deadly serious. ‘What kind of words?’
‘I can’t remember them all, but random words like groundless, and benediction. What do you think they mean?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘Beats me.’
‘The dates on the map seemed to tally with the dates the women went missing. I can’t be certain, because I didn’t spend a great deal of time looking through them. But at first glance that’s what it looked like.’
‘Maybe the map related to something completely different and not the missing women,’ Sharon suggested.
‘But it still leaves us with the file,’ said Joseph. ‘That’s got to be odd. You don’t collect information on missing women as a hobby, do you?’
‘Some people still try to find Jack the Ripper,’ I put forward. ‘People do that kind of thing for a hobby.’
‘Mark was never interested in those kinds of freaky things,’ said Joseph.
‘So why the fascination with missing women?’ said Sharon. To hear her express some kind of doubt in her voice was alarming.
We sat in silence for a minute or two. There was a huge elephant in the room that no one was willing to acknowledge.
‘You often hear of people who keep detailed records of the crimes they commit…’ she said.
‘Jesus,’ said Joseph.
‘You can’t seriously believe that Mark has done some thing to those women, can you?’ I said, thinking it but not wanting to believe it myself.
‘He’s capable,’ said Joseph evenly, ‘when he flips. You know that.’
‘I was only making a suggestion, that’s all,’ said Sharon. ‘I don’t think for one minute that Mark would do that kind of thing.’
‘He travels the UK,’ said Joseph. ‘Buying and selling antiques.’
‘So do many other antique dealers,’ I said.
‘How many other antique dealers put together files on missing young women?’ Joseph countered.
‘That doesn’t make him a murderer,’ I said.
‘So now we’re talking murder?’ said Sharon. ‘That’s quite a leap from missing, don’t you think?’
I was letting my emotions run away with me again. ‘Yeah, of course it is. Look, I just want to help Mark. If he’s in some kind of trouble…’
‘And perhaps it’s all a big misunderstanding,’ said Sharon. ‘Everyone is jumping to conclusions. I take it you haven’t asked Mark about the file,’ she said to me.
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t know how to broach the subject, and it’s festered away in my head till it’s reached epic proportions.’
‘Then you need to ask Mark,’ she said.
‘Me?’
‘You’re his friend. He’s not talking to us right now. There’s probably a rational explanation for all this.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Probably.’ I wasn’t entirely convinced, and by sharing the information with Sharon and Joseph all I’d done was put the ball firmly in my side of the court. I had to do something about it. ‘Maybe I’m just getting all worked up over nothing,’ I said. ‘Perhaps all that stuff with the woman from the Blue Lias is colouring my thoughts a little too much.’
‘The murdered woman you found?’ said Sharon.
I nodded. I laughed, though it wasn’t very heartfelt. ‘There I go condemning other people for collecting information on potential crimes, when I go and do the same thing.’
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 31
