Doppelganger (30 page)

The Jack Lockwood
Mystery Series

Rock’n’Roll Suicide
is the
first in the series. It is an action-packed thriller/mystery filled with
murders and twists. Whilst researching the suicide of rock queen Maggi O’Kane
in 1980, ex-criminal profiler Dr Jack Lockwood discovers evidence suggesting
that she and her band were murdered to suppress facts she found out about John
Lennon’s assassination. 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/RocknRoll-Suicide-Lockwood-mysteries-ebook/dp/B009XA5SQ4

Extracts from some of the reviews
on Amazon.co.uk for
Rock’n’Roll Suicide
:

‘One of the best stories I’ve
read in a long time.  I was totally hooked from the first page…’

‘Not only a great crime thriller,
but also very insightful about the human psyche…’

‘Fast-moving, intricately-woven
thriller that will make your heart beat faster as you read it…’

‘Fast moving with lots of twists
and turns…’

‘Fast paced adventure story
cleverly mixing fact and fiction…’

Here’s the first chapter of the first Jack Lockwood mystery
Rock’n’Roll
Suicide
:

Maggi O’Kane was beautiful,
talented and dead. In the 1970s her high-octane rock performances were
toe-tappingly gritty, with primeval thumping riffs that could tear you apart.
Yet, astonishingly, she was also a musical virtuoso, writing and performing
some of the most sensitive and soulful ballads I’ve ever heard. But on the 20th
of November 1980 she murdered her band and killed herself, and her violent end,
I later discovered, was inextricably linked to that of John Lennon, gunned down
in New York just twelve days previously.

What made her do it? Nobody
knows. But I was determined to find out.

It was why I’d pitched up at
The
Mansh
in the drizzly twilight of that November day in 2008, dragging my
sleeping gear from the car along with my meagre carrier bags of provisions.
Gillingham Hall, to use the building’s official title, was the large
dilapidated mansion where, almost 30 years ago, four people had lost their
lives, apparently following a week-long binge of drinking and drug taking. They
were Alistair Norbury, lead guitar and Maggi’s partner and father of her child,
bad-boy bass player Ben Frensham, Duncan Macrae on drums, and finally lead
singer and all-round attention-magnet Maggi.

Tragically, her killing spree was
what Maggi was mainly remembered for – to most people her wonderful music was
an afterthought, underrated and forgotten, tainted as it was by her final
rampage. I’d listened for hours to her rock chants and gentle melodies, read
everything I could find about her and watched the few videos that survived, and
I had a large poster of her face pinned up on the wall above my desk. I suppose
you could say I was becoming obsessed with her. They had warned me at the
hospital about avoiding obsessions, apparently it’s one of the warning signs,
an indication that an ex-psychiatric patient might spiral back into a
breakdown. But I had a lid on it, I told myself.
It was work
.

That day in 1980 had been,
according to what I’d read, unseasonably sunny, but cold. I tried and tried to
picture the scene at The Mansh: musicians cranky, warming themselves beside the
roaring log fires, cars and vans in the drive, sexual rivalries and fierce
arguments, even fights. I’d heard rumours that, amongst others, the Rolling
Stones and their friend, the arcane Teutonic beauty Anita Pallenberg, had been
regular guests, but dates and times were hard to establish. There were also
suggestions of black magic séances, drug taking and the most astounding sexual
couplings imaginable. But nothing you could pin down, no
actual facts
.

Standing in the weed-infested
circular front drive I surveyed the faded beauty of this Georgian monstrosity:
a large sprawling pile that was at the beginning of its end. Holes in the roof,
nasty yellow plywood lozenges over the windows, and plants sprouting from the
lower brickwork. A couple of tenners dropped into the sweaty palm of Alf
Morris, surely Bath Council Parks Department’s most disconsolate employee, had
earnt me keys for the main gates and the front door, and his urgent
imprecation: “For Gawd’s sake don’t do any damage, lock up after yourself and
get these buggers back to me by Monday afore anyone notices.”

My grand idea to come to the
place first took root when I’d read about the goings on: the orgies, the drug
taking, the cream of musical talent of the seventies who used the place like a
second home. Apparently Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Peter Gabriel and plenty
of others were supposed to have jammed around, got high, and made music in the
rooms of the grand building, but nothing had been confirmed.

I thought once again about the
opening words of the final chapter of my forthcoming book,
Crash and Burn –
rock stars who died too young
:

On the sunny winter’s morning
of 20 December 1980 Maggi O’Kane assembled her partner and the remaining two
members of her band together in the rehearsal room of ‘The Mansh’ and shot them
all, using the assault rifle she’d produced from the plush leather box that
usually contained her custom-built Gretsch guitar. Then she took her father’s
old army pistol, inserted its barrel into her mouth and pulled the trigger,
leaving the brains that forged the hits
Crazy Without You
and
Hard
Times in Seattle
plastered across the wall behind her.

No one knows what caused
Maggi’s crazy aberration. In fact everyone said that she was a kind, well
balanced person, whose zest for life and sheer human warmth attracted
inevitable comparisons with Lulu, whose career in so many ways mirrored her
own, albeit that Maggi’s style was much more raunchy hardcore rock. Everyone
liked her, she was successful, she had a partner and a young child; in fact she
had everything to live for.

So why did she do it?

To find some reasons I had to
delve a little deeper into the distant past to establish just what was going in
her life in those seemingly happy-go-lucky days before it happened...

The trouble was, ‘delving a little
deeper’ was proving much harder than I’d imagined.

Elucidating facts about the
circumstances of the events seemed virtually impossible. All the witnesses to
the 28-year-old occurrence were also apparently victims, and those who had
known them were hard to trace. The only things I had to draw on were newspaper
and police reports of the time, which stuck to the bare facts, and I was
desperate to dig up some new angle, some
new take
on those terrible
events. Maybe it was arrogance that drove me, perhaps I was vain enough to
think that psychologist and fledgling writer Dr Jack Lockwood had to blaze a
literary trail with his first epic, and that trawling over old ground and
regurgitating other people’s accounts wasn’t good enough for me. Arrogance or
stubbornness, I’m not sure which. Maybe both.

But it was more than that. When I
looked at Maggi’s face, with her long mane of dark hair and large expressive
eyes, she seemed to be crying out to me
“I didn’t do it! I swear I didn’t
do it
!”. But believing that she couldn’t have done such a monstrous
thing was flying in the face of the facts, and I knew from bitter past
experience that facts can’t always be your friends.

I’d wandered past the mansion,
down a path and into Gillingham Woods more out of curiosity than anything,
lured by the denseness of the branches, the darkness that closed in on you the
moment you entered, reminding me of childhood fairy stories about witches and
wolves. I walked to clear my head, to remind myself I was no longer under
psychiatric supervision and was free to go wherever I wanted. And I went on
walking until my legs ached, it had started raining and I’d scratched my cheek
on some overhanging branches. As I peered through a gap in the trees I could
just make out the mansion in the distance, realising that all this land was
once part of the huge Gillingham Park Estate that had encompassed a number of
farms and cottages as well as the big house, Gillingham Hall, re-christened
The
Mansh
by Maggi, who had bought it way back in 1969.

As the rain trickled down between
my collar and my neck and I stumbled through the undergrowth back to the house,
I thought about Maggi. She’d been one of the true pioneers, one of the very few
woman rock stars in the days when male rockers were the norm, as indeed they
still are now. She was perhaps one of the first exponents of ‘girl power’
before the phrase had been in use, not that Maggi’s phenomenal personality and
zest for life could ever be packaged into any kind of cliché. In my opinion she
had been a musical genius, and it seemed she was contented with her success.
She partied hard and lived life to excess, but what was unusual about that?
Crucially, the conventional explanation of an excess of drink and drugs was
something that would surely
inhibit
rather than encourage the ghastly
scenario that had occurred. What’s more, despite today’s girl gangs in inner
cities, it’s still relatively rare for a woman to commit crimes of violence,
even rarer for a female to use firearms. Yet the facts were incontrovertible.
It had happened. Everyone said so.

The brief for
Crash and Burn
was to assess circumstances and reasons for a number of rock stars’ untimely
deaths from the 60s to the 90s, utilising my knowledge and experience gained as
a Behavioural Investigative Adviser, a role I was temporarily ‘resting’ from.
And guess what? Against all the odds I actually did manage to find that new
angle that nobody else knew about, but, just like the curse of the monkey’s
paw, I wish now that I hadn’t. Maggi’s death, I discovered, was linked with
that of John Lennon, though to my knowledge the pair never met. Much later I
discovered that both in their way were victims, but finding the link proved to
be one of the hardest projects I’ve ever faced.

I’d spent three years working as
a Behavioural Investigative Adviser with police forces around the country on high
profile murder cases, achieving a modicum of success. I’d endured the
opprobrium of plenty of officers, shrugged off my jeering nickname
‘Crackerjack’ (a reference to Robbie Coltrane’s British TV profiler series
Cracker
),
all the while doing my job, which was to be a supportive part of the
investigating team. Criminal profiling was the old fashioned term, perhaps
replaced by the more punchy acronym BIA because in the early days profilers had
made embarrassing and appalling mistakes. But almost two years ago, just when
the profession was beginning to garner some professional credibility and I’d
begun to forge a decent career, I’d made some serious misjudgements about a
case, leading to horrendous consequences. I’d ended up in a psychiatric
hospital as a result of a brush with death at the hands of Edward Van Meer,
who’d held me captive for two days and had been within a whisker of completing
his plan to kill me after hours of torture. Until I could convince the
powers-that-be to renew my ‘ACPO Approved’ status – ACPO meaning the
Association of Chief Police Officers – no police force in the country would
employ me, so until that day arrived I had to earn money some other way.

It had been serendipity that my
friend Ken Taylor happened to be an editor at Figaro Publications, a publishing
house that specialised in celebrity biographies and true crime. It’s an odd
thing the way when you’re in trouble, friends who you haven’t seen for years
pop up and help you, yet people whom you considered to be close allies suddenly
can’t find the time for your company. So it had been with Ken, whom I hadn’t
seen since my schooldays. Since the parting of our ways, when he went to
university and I became a jobbing builder, our lives had taken totally
different directions. But when he’d read about my troubles in
The Alleynian
,
Dulwich College’s old boys’ school magazine, Ken had got back in touch, and,
ever since then, he’d been my rock. Ken had not only commissioned the book, but
had actually suggested the idea to me in the first place. Working with lovable
Ken, who had a penchant for showing you pictures of his twins, Hazel and
Anthony, and an ever-ready laugh that made his multiple chins quiver like
jelly, had been a delight, in stark contrast to my relationship with my current
editor at Figaro, Giles Mander. Ken knew that after my year of troubles, what I
needed was to get my teeth into a project.

Ken had suggested I visit the
place where the massacre had occurred. Yes, I thought, why not? Maybe I’d be
able to choreograph Maggi’s actions in that same room where it had happened,
or, if I was exceptionally lucky, perhaps there might even be something left
behind, some tiny clue that no one had noticed?

You’d never think that this
mansion, with its now abandoned swimming pool and extensive grounds, was
allegedly where George Harrison had jammed for weeks with friends in the
seventies, or where Maggi O’Kane’s group ‘Border Crossing’ wrote and recorded
their eponymous iconic album. Between 1970 and 1980 The Mansh was used for
recording no less than 200 top-selling vinyl albums. In those days it had been
grand and beautiful.

 I managed to get the front
door lock to undo, and swung the creaking paint-cracked timber backwards into
the cave-like interior. Inside there was only darkness and cobwebs, a chink of
the dirty dregs of daylight blinking at the edge of the boarded window on the
landing. The promise of a raft of scintillating rock-star memories tingling
through the ether was what I’d been hoping for, but all I got was a vast
yawning maw of emptiness and the all pervading aroma of rot and fusty damp.

I pondered on my completed
chapters. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had been found dead in his swimming
pool in strange circumstances, whereas Keith Moon, of The Who, had deliberately
driven his Rolls Royce into one, and years later taken too many pills, either
deliberately or in error. The great Jimi Hendrix had died of an accidental
drugs overdose, while Kurt Cobain had committed suicide with a shotgun.
Talented, brilliant and tragic Nick Drake, described once as one of the most
talented songwriters of the decade, had overdosed on amitriptyline. They were
universally celebrated musicians, some of them with the status of sex gods, all
of them famous, even 40 years on. Research had taken me to California and the
Caribbean as well as all over Europe, including Père Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, where Jim Morrison of The Doors was buried not far from the grave of
Oscar Wilde and that of Edith Piaf, which struck me as particularly apposite
for such a trio of creative people. And John Lennon had been gunned down by
Mark David Chapman in front of witnesses. But, surprisingly, it was the death
of one of the least famous of my subjects, Maggi O’Kane, that the book was to
hinge upon, and at the time I had no idea that my investigations were going to
spring alive a new conspiracy theory surrounding John Lennon’s murder, as well
as a fresh wave of deaths, almost including my own.