Still life with Volkswagens

Four. Whose Volkswagen Is It Anyway?

Debby’s car pulls up beside Enlightenment. She gets out looking brisk and business-like, and homes in on Barry who is still sitting at the wheel of his car. She throws open the passenger door and gets inside. Barry is about to offer a few words of greeting and endearment but she has no time for that. He sees that she’s holding, nay brandishing, two manila envelopes. Her sense of purpose is awe-inspiring, but as yet he can’t begin to guess what that purpose is.

Very determinedly she says, “I’ve been doing some thinking, Barry, and here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to give you the first of these envelopes. You’re going to open it and then I’m going to ask you a question. You’ll give a simple yes or no answer, and that answer will determine whether or not I give you the second envelope. Do you understand?”

“Er, yes.”

It seems pointless to say anything else, so he takes the first envelope. It feels as though it contains a small booklet, and he opens it up to discover that the booklet is a passport, and not just any old passport, but his passport, at least a passport in his name with his photograph inside. He is both surprised and affronted. How could she go behind his back like that? Okay, so she may have owned a photograph of him, but she must have filled in a passport application form without consulting him, must have even forged his signature. He thinks he has every right to feel angry and abused, but something in Debby’s face tells him it would be inappropriate and pointless to tell her this.

“Now for the question,” she says. “Will you leave this caravan and come travelling with me?”

“What?” says Barry. “When? Where to? What will we do for money?”

“A one word answer,” says Debby. “Yes or no.”

In normal circumstances he would be very happy to answer with a good many prevarications and hesitations, but he can tell that Debby in her current mood wouldn’t wear that. With great reluctance, the reluctance being because he doesn’t want to have to answer, he has to answer, “No.”

“In that case,” says Debby, “you get to open the second envelope.”

She hands him the second manila envelope and while he’s still struggling to open it, she’s got out of Enlightenment, got into her own car and driven away. He takes out a single, small sheet of paper, but by the time he’s read the message written on it, it’s more or less superfluous. It says;

Goodbye Barry. I’m off.

If you want me back you could always get in your car and find me.

One night she’s there again. It’s late. Fat Les is working alone in the garage on a Baja style Beetle, fitting Desert Dueller tyres to a set of aluminium wheels, and sanding down the body kit ready for spraying, when he hears the clack of high heels approaching, and he stops what he’s doing, looks up and sees Detective Inspector Cheryl Bronte standing in his space. The harsh overhead light is unflattering. It makes her look older and more lined, but it also makes her look harder and more formidable.

“Hello Les,” she says.

“Yes?” he says.

“That’s an ugly looking thing you’re working on there,” she says nodding at the Beetle.

“Well, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?” Les replies.

“I’ve never liked Beetles much,” she says. “I don’t know why. I guess I’ve always found them too small, too slow, too noisy, maybe just a little too strange for my tastes.”

“Am I supposed to be interested in this?” Les asks.

“I thought you were interested in Beetles, that’s all,” she says and she wanders around the workshop. She is keen to appear casual, curious, unsystematic. She wants to make it clear that she is not doing anything so unsubtle as looking for clues. She picks up and considers some spare parts that are lying around on shelves and benches; a set of braided, stainless steel ignition leads, coloured window seals, some chrome push rod tubes. She appears to find them fascinating.

“You see Les,” she says, “I have a theory about you.”

“Well, I’m flattered,” he says sarcastically.

She doesn’t react. She says, “My theory is that you’re the one blowing up Volkswagens.”

“Is that a theory?” Les asks. “It sounds more like an unsubstantiated allegation to me.”

“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Les?”

Les doesn’t rise to that one.

She continues, “I think it might all be about mid-life crisis, the male menopause, waning sexual powers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh really?”

“About the fact that you’re socially retarded, about being stuck in a perpetual adolescence. I mean, think about it, the Beetle is a car of the young, and let’s face it Les, young, you’re not.”

“I never was.”

“My theory, my assertion, is that you see all these kids coming through this place, all with money and ideas, having their cars tarted up, going out partying, raving, getting high, getting laid, and it makes you feel very jealous. Why wouldn’t it? Anybody might feel the same. Anybody might get angry and resentful. The difference is, you want to destroy. You want to destroy Volkswagens.”

“Why would I want to destroy the thing I make my living out of?”

“Men always destroy the thing they love.”

“I don’t love ‘em. I just make a living out of them.”

“That’s what you say. Volkswagens are nothing special to you. You’re not obsessed by them, you’re not hung up on them.”

“Too bloody true.”

“You don’t fool me Les.”

“You don’t fool me, either,” Les barks, finally losing his rag. “Okay, you’ve told me your bloody theory, now arrest me or leave me alone.”

“It’s not just a theory,” she says softly.

“This is fucking silly,” says Les. “You don’t know anything about me, and what you think you know is completely wrong.”

“You wish,” she says.

“You’re crazy,” says Les. “What possible evidence have you got against me?”

“You don’t seriously think I need evidence do you? I just know. Call it instinct, call it a gut feeling. Sometimes I think it’s more like a sixth sense, a kind of precognition.”

Les is looking and feeling like a cornered rat. How can he prove his innocence to someone who has established his guilt through extrasensory means?

“Besides,” says Cheryl Bronte, “you’re a fat bastard and I don’t like the look of you. I’m coming for you Les. I know where you live. I’ll see you again.”

♦

Marilyn does not want to believe that her father is the kind of man who would kidnap her current boyfriend and then blow up one of his cars. But she realises that the fact she doesn’t want to believe it is neither here nor there. She’d rather believe that her father is safe, sober and well-balanced, but he is clearly none of the above.

If her father was going to kidnap anyone surely it ought to be Barry bloody Osgathorpe. He was the one who drove her father insane. There would be some logic, some sense in taking revenge on him. But why Carlton? Just because he collects Volkswagens? It seems reasonable enough that her father should hate Volkswagens after all that he’s been through, but that hardly justifies kidnapping Carlton. And how would her father know that Carlton was a collector? How would he know that Carlton even existed? How would he know he was her boyfriend? Well actually it has been in one or two gossip columns, if her father was allowed to read gossip columns in the asylum, but still…

He’s out there right now, somewhere, who knows where, and what the hell is he doing? Sleeping in ditches, in shop doorways? And how is he managing to live? By begging? By stealing? She tries to picture it, but mercifully she can come up with nothing.

Ever since Carlton disappeared she has been staying in his house rather than her own place. The fact that his house is a rambling gentleman’s residence while hers is a studio flat has nothing to do with it, she insists. She feels safe here. There is a high wall around the garden, closed circuit cameras that pick out wanted or unwanted guests, a wrought iron security gate that can only be opened from within the house; not that any of that was enough to save Carlton.

She meanders slowly from one room to another, looking at the diversity and profusion of his Volkswagen collection. It all feels special to her. It’s all so terribly Carlton. And yet without him it seems so inert, like a deserted museum, a burial chamber. But she needs to be there in case Carlton returns, or in case someone delivers a ransom note, or in case the police suddenly solve the crime (which seems totally unlikely), or in case the worst happens, the worst still being mercifully undefined. She doesn’t understand the police. She has been interviewed twice by this Cheryl Bronte woman, but the interviews haven’t been much more than general, perfunctory little chats. The woman seems barely interested, doesn’t even seem wholly convinced that Carlton has actually been kidnapped. Marilyn doesn’t see why they can’t launch a vast nationwide media campaign, get every person in the land to go searching through basements and sheds and disused buildings, looking for her Carlton. Failing that, they could always put out a wanted poster for her father, not that she’s told the police that she suspects her father might be behind it all, that would be giving too much away.

She continues broadcasting her weather reports from the television studio. They seem considerably more poignant now that she thinks her father is out there exposed to the elements. Sometimes she finds it hard to be vivacious. And then one day in the newsroom she overhears a reporter arguing with a producer.

The reporter says, “I don’t see how we can justify sitting on this one. If nothing else, if we reported it we might save a life or two, at least prevent some property damage.”

“The gag is coming from a very high source,” says the producer.

“Anti-terrorist?”

“Yep.”

“Well they’re a bunch of drama queens. Look, these cars are being blown up all over England — at least fifty to date. And we’re supposed to pretend it’s not happening?”

“We’re not pretending anything. We’re just not reporting it. We’re helping the authorities in their battle with terrorism, that’s all.”

“Oh please.”

“Look, if we report that somebody’s going around blowing up these things, then every would-be terrorist, vandal and general nutter is going to start copycatting. At the very least you’re going to spread panic. Every arsehole who owns a Volkswagen Beetle is going to think his car’s about to go bang.”

Marilyn listens and weeps. Oh God, it all fits. It must all be true. Until now she might just have believed that her father wasn’t behind it all, but now…She takes the reporter aside, makes him tell her everything he knows. She listens carefully, takes it all in. What she has to do next is perfectly clear to her.

That night she bounces onto the television screen looking slightly more manic than usual. Behind her the computer map of England has gone hallucinatory, blurring into acidic yellows and fuzzed electric blue.

She looks at the map and says, “In the south of England there have been intermittent explosions of Volkswagen Beetles. And there have been similar outbreaks in the Midlands and the North — East. Showers of broken glass and twisted metal have been affecting the South Coast, and the pattern seems to be spreading and becoming prolonged. Things are pretty unsettled and the outlook isn’t very bright.”

She stops for a moment, fights back the tears, struggles to find the right words.

“Dad,” she says, “if you’re out there, if you’re watching, please don’t blow up any more Volkswagens. What do you say?”

The floor manager was quite right. The audience for Marilyn’s nocturnal weather forecasts is not large. But one person who is still insomniac enough to be watching is Fat Les. He knows Marilyn and her father from way back and he doesn’t for a moment think her words are going to have any effect on crazy Charles Lederer, but they do have a profound effect on him. He immediately knows what he has to do. He has to go and re-establish contact with Barry Osgathorpe, maybe even with Ishmael.

♦

Barry is asleep at the wheel when Fat Les arrives. The caravan site is quiet. The weather is fine, a relief after all the rain they’ve been having. Les has chosen a special vehicle for this trip, one of the cars he has for sale at Fat Volk Inc, a burnt ochre Beetle roadster conversion, with a milk chocolate-coloured velour interior and tonneau cover, American eagle eenterlines, Monza exhaust and a louvred engine lid. It looks slick and sexy. It does not match Fat Les’s personality in any way.

Les has been driving for several hours, growing ever more tense and impatient. This is an important mission he’s on. The site has taken some finding. Once there, he does a noisy circuit around the caravans, barbecue areas and children’s playground while looking for Barry. But it’s obvious who he’s come to see, and a group of little kids point the way without even being asked. The noise of Les’s car fails to rouse Barry, so Les has a moment or two to examine Enlightenment. He kills the engine of the roadster, gets out, peers closely. It was Fat Les who rebuilt and customised Barry’s wicked-looking vehicle and it appears that his handiwork has held up pretty well, although he doesn’t understand why there’s a bad rendition of a Beetle and the initials GB painted on it.

When he’s finished having a good look at the car he reaches in through the open car window and shakes Barry awake. Barry stirs disorientatedly from a deep sleep, and when he opens his eyes and sees Fat Les’s plump, sweaty features no more than two feet away from him, his first thought is that he must still be dreaming. It is not a very pleasant dream. The face of Fat Les is one that he thought he would never see again.

“You’ve got to help me,” Les says while Barry is still rubbing his eyes.

“What?”

“The heat’s closing in,” Les continues. “They’re out to get me. They want to lock me up and throw away the key.”

Barry, only gradually becoming convinced that he is actually awake, shoves open the car door and climbs out. He walks up and down, trying to shake himself into alertness.

“Who’s out to get you?” he asks.

“The pigs,” says Les, as though that’s perfectly obvious.

Barry blinks and scratches himself. He’s not quite ready for this level of intensity and paranoia.

“Long time no see,” he says as a stalling tactic. “How’ve you been, Les?”

“Okay till now.”

“Why are they after you? Why are they going to lock you up?”

“Because of the exploding Volkswagens.”

“Oh, that old thing.”

“You know about this?” Les demands.

“No, not really,” says Barry. “People assume I ought to, but actually I don’t. And really I don’t want to.”

“That’s all right for you.”

“Yes it is.”

“But not for me. They think I’m the one doing it.”

“Are you the one doing it?”

“No!” Les insists.

“Then why do they think you are?” Barry asks.

“Because they’re pigs.”

Barry isn’t finding this a particularly fascinating conversation. He’d rather be asleep than talking with Fat Les, but he attempts to be sympathetic.

“Look at it this way Les, the fewer cars there are in the world, the more chance we have of saving the planet.”

“I just want to save my own skin,” says Les.

“Well that’s a little short-sighted of you, isn’t it?”

Les isn’t enjoying the conversation very much either. He remembers that Barry always had a penchant for the naive and gnomic utterance but this is ridiculous.

“Look,” says Les fiercely, “it’s not me doing it.”

“I never said it was,” Barry replies reassuringly.

“But I reckon I know who is.”

“Then you should tell the police.”

“No. We’ve got to find him first.”

“We?”

“You and me Barry. The old firm. We used to be a great team. We used to be able to do wonders. We can find bloody Charles Lederer and turn him in.”

“Charles Lederer?”

“Yeah. It’s Marilyn’s old man who’s doing the blowing up.”

The very name of Marilyn Lederer still holds an overwhelming allure and fascination for Barry. She’s the real thing. Debby was a perfectly serviceable everyday kind of girlfriend but as an object of fantasy and desire she couldn’t possibly compete with the distant and unattainable Marilyn. Just thinking about her now he comes over all misty-eyed, which is a source of considerable irritation to Fat Les.

Les says, “If Marilyn thinks her old man’s doing the bombing then that’s good enough for me.”

“Does she think that?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“No, but I’ve seen her on the telly.”

“Television?”

Les explains that she is a late night weathergirl on a satellite channel. Barry thinks he might faint. The very idea that images of his dream girl are being beamed through the ether is almost too much to bear. But that’s of no interest to Fat Les.

“You see,” he says, “if we can find her old man and beat a confession out of him and hand him over to Cheryl Bronte, then I’rfl in the clear, right? But we’re going to have to be smart. We’ll have to use all our wits to work out where he is, then hunt him down and trap him like a dog.”

“No,” says Barry quietly.

“Come on Barry, I’m prepared to beg if I have to.”

“That would be undignified,” says Barry. “And it wouldn’t work.”

“You want me falsely accused? Arrested? You want me thrown in jail?”

“No, not particularly,” says Barry. “But, you know, I really don’t give a lot of thought to what happens to people like you, Les.”

Actually, Barry is thinking about how he can get to see some of Marilyn’s television broadcasts. He thinks he might buy a satellite dish, a television, and, of course, a video recorder so he can tape her performances and watch them over and over again in the privacy of his own caravan.

“You’re being a real shit, Barry,” says Les.

“I never claimed to be anything else,” replies Barry.

For a moment it looks as though Fat Les is about to hit him, but Barry looks so weak, so ineffectual, there’d be no joy in it. Les spits a lump of phlegm onto the bonnet of Enlightenment. It lodges just below the Green Beetles logo. Barry does not react.

“You see,” Barry says solemnly, “a journey of a million miles begins with a single step.”

Fat Les looks blank. Then Barry takes three steps towards Enlightenment, gets inside and returns to his pose of meditative calm in the driver’s seat. Les is disgusted. He goes back to his roadster, guns the engine wildly and scrapes a rear wing against a gatepost as he powers angrily away.

It is quite an occasion for Barry Osgathorpe. For once he is not to be found either in his caravan or at the wheel of Enlightenment. It is one o’clock in the morning and he is in the clubhouse of the caravan site. This is a place he normally stays well away from. It is a large, unhomely barn of a place, with plastic tables and stacking chairs and a small stage in one corner where country and western acts perform every Friday and Saturday evening.

Now the place is empty, but Barry is still, in a sense, there to be entertained. The clubhouse has satellite television, and Barry has obtained special permission from Sam Probert, the owner of the site, to be there alone after hours and to watch the weather forecast. Of course Sam Probert thinks Barry is raving mad, but he is not the first to have thought that.

Barry sits on the edge of his seat, watching the big wall-mounted TV screen, waiting for the end of the current programme. Suddenly there’s a tap at one of the clubhouse’s uncurtained windows. Barry leaps up in surprise and is then alarmed that some disturbance might prevent him from seeing Marilyn’s appearance. But he looks over at the window and sees the face of the little boy who calls himself the Ferrous Kid.

“Let me in,” the Kid mouths through the window.

Irritated, flustered, and keeping one eye on the television screen, Barry goes to the door and lets the Kid in.

“What are you doing?” the Kid asks.

“Watching television.”

“I thought this place closed at midnight.”

“Usually it does. There’s a programme I have to see.”

“Don’t tell me, some sort of environmental special, right?”

“Well, the environment certainly comes into it,” says Barry. “Why don’t you shut up and watch?”

The Kid does as he’s told. The pair of them sit there, staring up at the television set, experiencing their different types of anticipation. Then all at once Marilyn fills the screen and her voice is saying, “Tomorrow will be sunny in eastern areas but cloud and showers over exposed western districts will spread across the country during the day. Cloud will thicken in the north…”

But Barry is not at all interested in the words, he’s just absorbing the image, the iconography. She is lovely, shimmering and perfect. He’s tried denying it. He’s tried wishing it away, but the fact remains he’s still as totally obsessed with her as ever. He loves her more than he can possibly express. At the very end of the forecast she says goodbye and winks at the camera. It feels as though it’s meant specially for him.

When the commercials start Barry says to the Kid, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” the Kid replies. “You can never rely on these weather forecasts.”

“I don’t mean the weather,” Barry says. “I mean what do you think of her?”

It’s only then that the Kid understands. He realises she must be the one who has figured so largely in some of Barry’s traveller’s tales. Actually, he finds her a bit ordinary.

He had been expecting something more, but he decides to be encouraging for Barry’s sake.

“She’s great,” he says. “She really revs my engine.”

“Mine too,” says Barry, completely forgetting about the ecological dangers of a really revved engine.

♦

Marilyn sits off camera. A make-up girl fusses around her face, even though there has been almost no time for it to become disarrayed. Marilyn thinks her performance tonight was a little lack-lustre. In fact it’s been lack-lustre for a while. How could it be otherwise? Her boyfriend has disappeared and her renegade father is blowing up Volkswagen Beetles. But the show must go on, and she has stopped inserting daughterly messages in her weather forecasts. It was a pragmatic decision. It did no good. She has spoken again to the reporter who wanted to break the exploding Beetle story and he has told her that it’s still going on and that the gag is still in place. Perhaps her father has never even seen her broadcasts. Now more than ever she craves prime time.

She feels impotent. She feels desperate, desperate enough to try one last, high-risk gambit. She doesn’t know exactly how she expects it to work. She can’t even be sure it will help at all, but she has made up her mind. She’s going to see Barry Osgathorpe.

She drives all night. The motorways are dark and littered with roadworks. She runs through all her Suzanne Vega cassettes in the course of the drive. She arrives in Filey a little before dawn, but it is light by the time she locates the site and Barry’s caravan.

She doesn’t bother to knock. She simply tries the door and finds it open. She enters quietly, not wanting to wake him yet. He lies there in a cocoon of tangled, frayed, grey sheets. She looks at him closely. Yes, she can still sort of see why she once agreed to sleep with him. Her tastes have moved on a little since then, but it won’t be entirely disagreeable to do it again. She sits on the edge of the bed and strokes his head, just gently enough to bring him out of sleep. His eyes open, he looks at her and he doesn’t even seem surprised to see her.

“You came,” he said. “I had a feeling you would.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Life usually brings a man those things he most truly needs.”

“Well, good,” she says.

“I used to think I didn’t need a weathergirl to know which way the wind blows, but now I see it differently.”

Even given Barry’s penchant for eccentric behaviour, Marilyn is taken aback by this reception. Surely he has a duty to be surprised.

“No doubt you need me too,” he continues, “otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Well yes, there’s something you can do for me. You can find my father.”

“It’ll mean going back on the road, won’t it?”

“Of course.”

“I wouldn’t do that for just anyone.”

“I’m not just anyone.”

“Yes, I’d do it for you.”

“There’s even a reward,” she says.

“Yes?”

A moment later she is in bed with him, and minutes after that, torrents of hot semen are coursing like molten lava down Marilyn’s moist, yielding, eager throat. Barry is impressed. He thinks she must quite like him. And later that same day Enlightenment has fresh tyres, a new battery and is full of petrol. The whitewashed Green Beetles logo has been carefully sponged away. Barry is wearing a familiar blue leather motorcycle suit and he looks every other inch a Road Warrior. He sits in the driver’s seat, starts the engine. A fog of choking, dirty blue exhaust fumes expands behind the car. Barry doesn’t give a shit. He guns the engine some more. A group of children comes running and congregates around the car. “Where are you going Barry?” the Ferrous Kid asks, and Barry replies, “Call me Ishmael.” He floors the accelerator, lets in the clutch, and he’s on the road again.

Here is Charles Manson living at the Spahn Movie Ranch; a permanent, though rundown, movie set in the style of a cowboy town. It consists of one main street, with the façades of a jail, a café, a funeral parlour. Occasionally the set is used by makers of TV commercials or moderately ambitious porn movies. The only things that look out of place here, and not at all cowboy town, are half a dozen or so stolen Volkswagen dune buggies parked a little way off the main drag.

Manson has moved his whole extended family out here, and they receive a lot of company; mostly outlaw biker types who belong to chapters with catchy names like Satan’s Slaves or the Straight Satans. Manson is free with his food and dope, and the girls in the family will do just about anything he tells them; ‘anything’ meaning, in general, that they’re extremely willing to have sex with unhygienic guys they’ve never set eyes on before.

Out here at the edge of the desert, Manson has decided that things are going to get fairly Apocalyptic before too long. Helter Skelter is on its way. There’ll be an armed uprising by the blacks, who will slaughter millions of white folks, take over America, and then not too much later, realise they’ve been damned fools, recognise that Charles Manson is both God and the Devil incarnate, and invite him to become their leader.

In order to lie low during those years of conflict and turmoil, Manson has arranged a hideout in Death Valley, at the Barker Ranch, but he needs a means of getting there when all Hell breaks loose. Until now he has always favoured old school buses à la Ken Kesey as family transport, but he knows that not any old vehicle will make it through the rough desert terrain to the hideout. He needs something special, namely a fleet of Volkswagen dune buggies.

There are all sorts of practical reasons for choosing Volkswagens. They’re rugged and reliable, and they’re small enough to get through tight gorges and caverns where police vehicles can’t follow. With special outsize gas tanks they’ll have a range of a thousand miles or so, and if the going gets really tough, they’re light enough that two or three people can pick them up and carry them. Manson imagines a whole fleet of them, some loaded up with food, some with dangerous drugs, some with ammo. He sees them charging through the desert in V formation, himself at the front like Rommel, churning up the earth, a cloud of thick dust obliterating the world behind them.

But there’s more. Manson, not usually much of a reader, has been studying his Bible, and it’s all in there, all this stuff about the significance of the dune buggy, right there in the Book of Revelation. The dune buggies are going to have breastplates of fire, in other words they’re going to be horses of the Apocalypse, you dig? And the Beetles, who’ve recorded the song ‘Helter Skelter’ for their White Album, will be the horsemen. And there’ll be a fifth Beetle, no not George Martin, but Manson himself. And of course in England a Volkswagen Bug is called a Beetle, so you see it all makes sense, right, motherfucker?

♦

Manson starts to live out more of his fantasies. He sets up a production line behind the Spahn Ranch, which he calls the Devil’s Dune Buggy Shop. Volkswagens are stolen from town, taken to the ranch, stripped down, converted into vehicles of the Apocalypse. Some of them can be bartered for drugs and weapons, and he hopes they’ll be useful in some of his other fantasies, like kidnapping busloads of schoolgirls, raiding a military arsenal, murdering a few rich pigs.

Pride of the fleet is Manson’s own Command Vehicle. It is one Hell of a dune buggy. It looks both futuristic and ancient. There is a ‘magic sword’ sheathed in the steering column, locks of human hair tied round the roll bar, a sleeping platform, armour plate, a machine gun mounting, a fur canopy. It has been recently resprayed, then desert sand thrown onto the paint while still wet, to form a kind of camouflage.

When the whole shooting match is over, this Command Vehicle will be displayed at a car show in Pomona, California, and get a lot of admiring attention from the custom Volkswagen fraternity.

It is July 15, 1969 and Officer Breckenridge of the Los Angeles Sheriff Office is making a routine helicopter patrol flight over the desert, looking for…well, for anything that doesn’t look quite right. And he passes over the Spahn Movie Ranch and sees three Volkswagen floorpans lying below in the desert. It looks to him as though somebody down there is seriously into car theft and stripping down. He makes a note to take a closer look at ground level before too long.

But a few stripped Volkswagen chassis out in the desert, well it hardly looks like the crime of the century. It will be a month before he organises a police raid, quite a hectic month for the Manson family, a month in which the Hinman-Tate-LaBianca murders will take place. Manson and his family will indulge in murder, in the slashing and shooting and strangling of seven Los Angeles ‘piggies’. There will be pierced lungs, lacerated necks, the death of an unborn child. Words will be scrawled on walls in the blood of the dead. It will all be the devil’s business. People will talk of Satanic murder, as though there might be such a thing as Godly murder.

♦

And here in the aftermath, when every newspaper and magazine and television channel has covered the murders, is one Mrs McCann thinking about her missing daughter whom she knows was a member of the Manson family. To Manson, the daughter was known as Malibu Brenda and she was with him all the way from the beginning to the end of the madness. Mostly Mrs McCann prefers not to think about all the things her daughter must have done while in that man’s clutches. That it involved weird drugs and weirder sex she has no doubt; and she knows that violence, Satanism and murder were also on the menu, but there are limits to how much chapter and verse she can take. However, when Manson makes the cover of Life magazine, even she finds it hard not be interested.

Her relationship with Brenda had always been a difficult one, but she always tried to understand, to be, you know, permissive. She didn’t even mind too much when Brenda relieved her of her ocelot coat; after all, she might need it for those cold desert nights.

But suddenly, here’s Mrs McCann perusing Life magazine and there are pictures of Manson and the family and of the Manson Command Vehicle, and she sees with horror that the vehicle’s canopy is made from the very fur coat that her daughter stole from her. She is speechless. Her heart suddenly hardens. There are some things, many things, you might forgive a daughter, but turning your best ocelot fur coat into a canopy for a dune buggy of the Apocalypse is surely not one of them.

That same fur canopy is another of the relics that is supposedly to be found in Carlton Bax’s locked room.