McCoy recognised the shirt. Was made of some sort of black see-through material with wee silver stars on it. He recognised it because he’d had the same one on last night, only then he was onstage at the Electric Garden, not lying in an unmade bed with a syringe sticking out his arm. Rest of the outfit was the same, too. Jeans, pointed cowboy boots, some thin silver chains around his neck and some cloth bands tied round his wrists. Hair was remarkably intact. That spiky blond feather cut you would recognise at a hundred yards. That, the hooked nose and the wide grin that made up Bobby March. Rock star.
He’d only been back in the shop five minutes, had just got the phone list from Billy on the front desk and was about to call Sammy Howe to tell him his trip to Aviemore was off when the phone started ringing. Was the manager of the Royal Stuart Hotel. Suspicious death. And, being the only bugger left in the shop, he had to deal with it. He’d been expecting to see some businessman lying dead with a heart attack, wallet cleaned out by whichever girl he’d picked up on the Green. Really wasn’t expecting this, not at all.
He was trying to breathe through his mouth, but it wasn’t doing much good. There was no way around it: the hotel room stank. Incense sticks, sweat, whatever Bobby March had eaten the night before. He walked over and opened the window: immediately, the noise of the trains on the bridge, glare of the sun on the Clyde below. He stood there for a minute looking out, trying to let the room fill up with less fetid air. Was helping a bit.
He turned. ‘They know yet?’ he asked the hotel manager.
‘Who?’
‘The hardcore downstairs,’ said McCoy.
He’d had to walk through them to get in the hotel entrance. Four or five teenage girls and one boy with glitter all over his face. All of them had the cloth bangles, most had an approximation of the crop. Couple of them in Bobby March T-shirts. The boy’s had looked homemade. Fuck knows what they would be like when the news broke.
‘Don’t imagine so,’ said the hotel manager.
McCoy looked at him. Tweed jacket, toothbrush moustache, ramrod straight back. Didn’t look like he’d be very familiar with rock stars or drug overdoses. More likely parade grounds and shouting at scared National Service boys.
‘Rest of the band?’ asked McCoy.
‘Billeted in deluxe rooms downstairs,’ said the manager. ‘All still asleep, apparently.’ Look on his face demonstrating exactly what he thought about that kind of behaviour.
‘And the maid discovered him when?’ asked McCoy.
‘About ten thirty. She knocked a few times, called out, but there was no response. Thought the guest had checked out. Most do by that hour. No response from his room so she used the master key to get in.’
‘And he was . . .’
The manager pointed at the bed. ‘Exactly like that.’
McCoy looked over at Bobby March again. Remembered what he’d been like last night, up on the stage. Shit, if he was honest. He’d looked out of it, forgetting words, half playing the songs. McCoy was about to leave, call it a night, when March turned to the band and nodded.
First notes of ‘Sunday Morning Symphony’ rang out and suddenly Bobby March moved up a gear, became what he had once been, the best guitarist of his generation. He grabbed the mic, grinned, sang the first line and the crowd, including McCoy, went mental. This was what they had all come to hear. He powered through all twelve minutes of the song, played out his skin, made you remember why The Rolling Stones had asked him to join, and ended on a dime.
The hall went wild, standing, clapping, shouting. March stood there sweating, looked wrung out, whatever power he’d summoned had run out.
‘This is from our new album, Starshine!’ he announced, and that’s when McCoy left. He’d had the misfortune to hear it.
The stuff about The Rolling Stones had haunted Bobby March ever since it happened. They’d asked him to audition after Brian Jones got chucked out. He came down to Barnes, did a couple rehearsals at Olympic. Keith Richards told some reporter waiting outside that it was ‘the best version of the Stones there ever was’ and they asked him to join.
Bobby did the one thing nobody, including Keith Richards, expected. He said thanks but no thanks. Had decided he had his own career to follow. By the look of the hotel room, the half-empty takeaway boxes, and the fact he was staying in the Royal Stuart and not the Albany, playing the Electric Garden not the Apollo, it might not have been the best decision Bobby March ever made.
‘Twenty-seven,’ said McCoy. ‘Another one.’
The manager looked blank.
‘Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. All twenty-seven when they died.’
The manager nodded, still no real idea what he was talking about.
McCoy sat down on one of the chairs in the wee seating area. There was an acoustic guitar leaning against the coffee table, leather jacket on the other chair, copy of Melody Maker and an overflowing ashtray by the side of the bed. Not exactly private jets and TVs out the window. Just a room in the kind of hotel that made its money from weddings and Masonic dinners.
If Bobby March had to die, he’d probably done it at the right time. Probably be more famous dead than he was alive. Two great albums, Sunday Morning Symphony in 1970 and Postcard From Muscle Shoals in ’71. Still, two great albums were better than loads of rotten ones. McCoy bent forward. A couple of the cigarette ends had lipstick on them.
‘No girlfriend?’ he asked the manager.
He shook his head. ‘Just Mr March.’
McCoy walked over by the bed, had another look around. Wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. Lipstick on the pillow? A forgotten earring? Whatever it was, it wasn’t there. Seemed odd for a rock star to be sleeping alone. Or maybe McCoy just believed all the sex, drugs and rock and roll stories. He walked through to the bathroom. Didn’t know what he was looking for there either. A message on the mirror in red lipstick? All he found was a shaving kit, a bottle of hay fever tablets and a plectrum on the edge of the sink. He put that in his pocket. Souvenir. Walked back through to the bedroom.
The stink of the room hit him again. In this heat, it was impossible to avoid. Not much he could do here and the sight of the lifeless body on the bed was getting to him. McCoy told the manager he’d wait for the medical examiner downstairs and left him staring at the body. He stepped out the room into the long corridor. Only smelt marginally better. A bucket of floor cleaner and a half-eaten hamburger sat on a tray outside one of the rooms.
He should really have told the manager not to let any press or photographers in, but he forgot. If truth be told, he wasn’t really focused on Bobby March and his untimely demise. Mind more concentrated on the fact he was down to acting as a duty officer at a suspicious death. Much as he’d liked Bobby March’s music, the last thing he wanted to do was fill out forms about his time of death and start phoning his next of kin.
The lift pinged and he got in, pressed G, and looked at himself in the mirror on the back wall. He needed a haircut. Needed a holiday. Needed to be anywhere but in a boiling hot lift, the stink of Bobby March’s last curry on him, suit jacket over his arm, dark rings under the arms of his shirt, a sheen of sweat on his face.
Things had to change. And soon.