Doppelganger (31 page)

The usual assumption, of course,
was that Maggi was off her head on coke, speed, alcohol, heroin or all four.
True, people act strangely when under those influences, but they don’t usually
act out of character to that extent. From what I’d gleaned from the police
papers about the incident, Maggi O’Kane appeared to be the kind of killer who’d
snapped into homicidal madness all at once, in contrast to the more usual mass
murderers who effectively ‘slow burn’ over a considerable period, nursing
grievances galore and leaking aggression, giving those around them a period of
warning. There was no reason to suppose she was capable of such a monstrous killing
spree, yet the police enquiry was in no doubt of her guilt. Where had she got
the weapons and ammunition from? If she was a spur-of-the-moment type of
killer, then surely obtaining the killing tools in advance was out of
character?

Another reason for coming here,
to The Mansh, was an attempt to get close to the atmosphere of those far off
1970s days I’d read about. Tomorrow I planned to make sketches, take some
photographs, try and get a grip on the layout of the rooms, find out where the
studios had been, take a look at what was left of the swimming pool, reputed to
be the scene of sexual acrobatics of the most amazing kind.

However, looking at the building
now, with the dirty drizzle spattering through the gap-tiled roof, a patch of
rot chewing up the floor and plaster hanging off the vast hall wall, it seemed
a long way from those crazy madcap days of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. After
the massacre, Gillingham Hall had been empty for a long time, no prospective
owner wanting to have anything to do with the scene of such a horrific event.
Then a religious group brought it as a commune, but after a short time, as if
infected by The Mansh’s curse, the commune went bankrupt and vacated the place,
then no one would buy it. As a listed building the requisite repairs would have
been prohibitively expensive, and, for the same reason, no one was allowed to
pull it down. It had finally been compulsorily purchased by the council, their
initial idea being to convert it to an old people’s home; however the finances
were not forthcoming. And with no electrics, sewage or mains water, Gillingham
Hall was not an attractive prospect for squatters.

And of course there’d been the
crazies too. The devil-worshipping group who broke in one night and held a
black mass, the kids who went there as a dare and swore they saw the ghosts. In
1730 it had been built as the central heart of a number of surrounding farms.
When the last of the owning family died in 1939, it remained unsold and fell
into disrepair until Maggi bought it in 1969 and refurbished it, enthusing it
with rock-star glamour, establishing one of the few independent recording
studios in England at the time. However The Mansh had never been run on
commercial lines, the musicians who worked there with Maggi were her friends
and colleagues, it was her personal fiefdom. That’s what made the massacre all
the harder to understand.

A couple of hours later I was
trying to get warm in my sleeping bag, listening to the drumming of a
particularly savage downpour of rain on the plywood windows, wondering if my
car would be stuck in a muddy quagmire in the morning. I’d climbed the
elaborate sweeping staircase and found this, the largest room at the front,
which appeared to be the most amenable, known I guessed, as the one described
as the ‘orgy room’.

There were high ceilings with
elaborate carvings, a hole in the wall where there’d obviously been a huge
fireplace and boarded-up windows. A stink of damp and mould and woodrot. Mouse
droppings and spiders’ webs. About as erotic as an ear infection.

Eventually I managed to fall
asleep, and began to dream about the holiday.

Ken Taylor and I had gone to
Cornwall as rehabilitation after my ghastly experiences in St Michael’s
psychiatric hospital. Ken had suggested the fishing break in Mousehole
(pronounces Mowsell, as the locals informed me) as relaxing therapy, and his
wife hadn’t objected to being left with their twins. Ken and I had reminisced
about old times and relaxed in a way we hadn’t done since school. Bearded
swarthy Nikki Prowse had owned the fishing launch MARY KENNY, and become a
friend of ours, and he’d taken us out and lent us rods, shared his tales of his
Cornish ancestors who were cutthroats and smugglers, while the sun beat down on
the foaming waves and we waited in vain for the fish to bite.

But I wasn’t dreaming about
Nikki, or even Ken. I was dreaming about Nikki’s sister Miranda, whom I’d got
to know well one afternoon while Ken was away touring the ruins of an ancient
church. Tall blonde Miranda’s shy smile had captivated me from the moment I’d
first met her, and now I was dreaming that she actually had turned up on our
final day as she’d promised. We’d seen each other for three evenings running,
and yet, on that final day, she stood me up without a word. Now, in my dream,
she was running towards me from a distance, shouting, but I couldn’t hear her
words. I couldn’t make out why she was so upset, why she appeared to be weeping
and imploring me to listen, or what exactly she was trying to tell me so
earnestly.

I woke up in a sweat, re-living
my disappointment when she hadn’t appeared on our final day, as she’d promised.
It was only afterwards that things made sense, when Nikki told me about the
married man she’d been seeing, how she’d been talking about going away with
him, and that, of course, had explained her sudden departure, at the same time
as that of the boyfriend, who’d simultaneously abandoned his wife and family.
Although I’d been divorced a year, my marriage had effectively ended two years
before that, and ever since I’d been looking for a serious girlfriend. I’d
planned to ask Miranda if I could see her on a regular basis, and I’d hoped she
might agree, but it wasn’t to be. Her betrayal was another setback to my
delicate mental state, another disappointment I had to face. But as always at
that time, it was Ken who had dragged me out of my depression. That was when
we’d cooked up the idea of
Crash and Burn
, on the long drive back to
London, while Ken kept moaning about the beloved St Christopher’s medal that
had belonged to his grandfather that he’d lost: we worked out that he must have
dropped it into the sea on our last fishing trip. Ken’s loss of the family
heirloom apart, the prospect of interesting paid work had snapped me out of my
gloom on our journey back to London, given me something to look forward to.

My next dream was much more
disconcerting. I was here, in this house, and I was observing those 1980
events. Seeing Maggi O’Kane emerge from somewhere at the back of the hallway
with the guitar case, place it on the floor, take out the assault weapon, lift
it and fire. Chaos was everywhere: screaming and shouting, people tumbling down
as they died. But thankfully my dream ended before Maggi had committed her
final act, her suicide.

The crashing noise woke me up.
Footsteps, outside on the stairs.

*
* * *

Lying there, heartbeat cranked up
high. Darkness. Apart from the splinter of moonlight that cast a ragged
splinter of light along the ruined ceiling.

Muzzy headed, I leapt out of bed
and ran to the doorway. In time to see the moonlight illuminating the man
running downstairs.

Yes, I tell you, I
did
see
him!

The short man in the smart suit
I’d seen so many times before.

This time, I resolved to catch
him, if only to prove that he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

I ran downstairs, keeping him in
sight, watched him stumble at the bottom of the treads, then career towards the
front door and pull it open. I tripped and fell down the last few stairs,
spread-eagling in the hallway. Scrambled up from my hands and knees. But by the
time I’d tumbled out of the front door I just managed to see his figure
vanishing into the distance, melting into the landscape, swallowed up by the
pouring rain. Barefooted, I stood outside, staring after him, mud oozing between
my toes.

For all the world, it had looked
like Edward Van Meer, the man I knew was behind bars. My brush with death at
Van Meer’s hands was what had caused my breakdown in the first place, and,
since I was now seeing him everywhere, it seemed as if I hadn’t recovered yet.
Yet I wasn’t acting abnormally in any other way, so, I reasoned, there had to
be some rational explanation for the man’s appearance. Of course Van Meer hated
me for what had happened, and he’d told me, in one long rambling letter smuggled
out of Broadmoor, that he longed to see me dead. But he was in prison, not here
on the outskirts of Bath.

So was I heading for another
breakdown?

I came back into the large
hallway, pondering on the dream that I’d been so abruptly woken from.

Something in the dream was
nagging at me. Some detail that the recreation of the scene I’d pictured so
many times had inspired me to think of in a different way, the brain’s computer
shuffling the facts and images, rearranging them in another semblance of order,
perhaps a more logical one. Then I remembered.

A door.

That was it
.

In all the reports about the
accident that no one alive had actually witnessed, the professionals’
assumption was that Maggi had appeared from the door to the cellar with her
guitar case containing the weapon, then stooped down to open it, beside that
same cellar door, and then shot everyone from there.

However the only door that
corresponded to what I’d imagined to be the cellar door I’d seen when I came
in, was securely shut and locked when I’d tried it. Was there something beyond
there that was worth looking at?

Sleep was impossible now, so I
went back upstairs and picked up the powerful torch, pulled on jeans and a tee
shirt and my trainers, and returned to the main hallway. Here there was more
moonlight coming through the chinks in the plywood blocking the windows, and I
went over to the locked door. I tried it again, but it was firmly shut. So I
went outside to my Volvo estate car and took a crowbar and club hammer from the
boot, returning to attack the locked door.

Hammering the chisel end of the
crowbar into the gap, I exerted some leverage and after a while the old timber
splintered and gave way. It swung backwards on its rusty hinges with a groan. I
shone the torch ahead. A couple of feet in from the doorstep I could see some
steps leading down. I moved forwards and began to descend, my yellow cone of
torchlight shimmering around the walls.

The last thing I remember was
feeling the blow to the back of my head.

I must have been out cold for
some time. The throbbing pain made my vision blur. Someone had obviously crept
up behind and slugged me with a heavy object, and I’d fallen down to the bottom
of this shaft. Who could have done it? Who even knew that I was here? Clearly
the man I’d chased earlier on had returned.

Shifting carefully, checking arm
and leg movements, to my relief I appeared to be uninjured. The torch was
unbroken, but its pathetic yellow glimmer told me its batteries were nearly
flat. I was surrounded by the cheesy smell of damp stone, and soggy soil was
under my fingertips – it looked as if the soft landing had saved me from
injury. As I felt around with my fingers, I wondered how hard it was going to
be to climb back to freedom. I stopped when my hand encountered something hard:
a ledge of stone. And on its surface, to my surprise, there was something cold
and metallic. I picked it up.

A camera. An old camera, the sort
in use in the 70s, decades before the advent of digital photography. Shining the
torch in the general area there was also a small black book. When I picked it
up it appeared to be an old pocket diary. I could just make out the date 1980
in gold on the cover. Excitedly, I opened it up and there, sure enough, a few
pages in were dates and handwriting, still legible after all these years.
Unfortunately it was in a language I couldn’t understand, possibly German.
Shining the torch around, I couldn’t see anything else. Whose diary could it
be, I wondered? Despite my throbbing head, I felt the stirrings of excitement
as I put the diary in my pocket and picked up the camera, then aimed the feeble
torch beam towards the stairs.