Wylding Hall

Chapter 13

Patricia Kenyon

There’s an old West Country ballad called “The Lady of Zennor.” Will turned me onto it when I interviewed him for that long piece I did for Mojo about Windhollow’s legacy. It’s based on a legend about a mermaid. Zennor’s a fishing village in Cornwall. I visited it after talking to Will; he told me there was a memorial in the village church. I thought he was having me on, but damned if it wasn’t the truth.

The story goes that there was a young man in the village who sang in the church choir. His voice was so beautiful that every Sunday, a mermaid would come out of the sea and walk up to the church and sit in the back just to hear him. I don’t know how she walked with a tail — they didn’t go into that. Eventually she converted to Christianity so she could marry him. The church is ancient, twelfth century, and when you go inside, you can see where she sat — someone made a special little wooden pew for her, with a mermaid carved on each end. I sat in it — no one was there to stop me. The church was empty and I could have walked out with it if I wanted, it was so small. She must have been tiny.

I asked Will why he was telling me about this particular legend and song. Obviously I knew why, but I wanted to hear him say it, even if it was off the record. He wouldn’t.

Lesley

No, I didn’t like her, not that I had time to get to know her. I didn’t trust her. I knew too many male singers, and you didn’t have to be Jimmy Page to get a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls hopping into bed with you.

I also knew that Tom Haring would pitch a fit when he found out. Which he did. The whole point of us being at Wylding Hall was to avoid distractions, and groupies are definitely a distraction. God knows how she knew we were there. Someone must have heard about Ashton and me singing at the pub, and blabbed it around.

She certainly wasn’t from the village — every guy in that place just about keeled over when he saw her, even Jonno.

And yes, of course I was jealous. Anyone would have been. She was like some hippie wet dream: platinum blonde in that slinky white dress. Not even a dress — it was a white slip; it might have been a hundred years old. It was sheer enough you could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

This is all we need, I thought, to get run out of town because some naked teenager shows up at the pub.

But Jonno, god bless him, he had the sense to give her his cape to cover up. And yes, he did wear a cape, a long sky-blue velvet cape that cost a fortune. It looked a lot better on her. What the hell’s a drummer going to do with a freaking cape? Jonno threw it over her and pulled her over to our table. Which, fortunately, was in the back corner. They all just fawned around her like she was the Queen or some such shit — Will and Ashton and Jonno.

And Julian, of course. Soon as he finished that song, he jumped up, grabbed his guitar and — I swear, I never saw him move so fast. He raced over and grabbed her hand, and just stared down at her.

My first thought was they knew each other, like she was an old girlfriend or someone from school. Yet he wasn’t looking at this girl like he knew her. It was more like he was totally amazed. For a second, I even thought she was someone from the press or maybe a rock star, some bigwig he’d invited but hadn’t imagined would really show up.

But it immediately became obvious she wasn’t. I can’t describe it, but she gave off this weird vibe. You know how you’ll see a crazy person in the street, and even though they’re not acting overtly crazy — like, they’re talking to themselves, so maybe they’re on a cellphone. But you just know there’s no cellphone. You just know, that person is nuts.

That’s how I felt about her. Like maybe she was on drugs and might pull a knife, or god knows what. She looked strung out. Didn’t know where she was, didn’t know her name. Ashton kept asking her, “Who are you, who are you?” until Julian told him to shut the fuck up.

That alone was enough of a warning. Julian never lost his temper. Ever.

Whoever she was, I didn’t want her anywhere near me.

Ashton

Well, I thought, where’s Julian been hiding this? Still waters run deep! Here’s this drop-dead gorgeous wisp of a girl comes running up to him. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Also, she was just about starkers. When Jonno wrapped his idiotic cape around her, I wanted to throttle him — doesn’t hurt to look! But I suppose it was for the best.

Clearly, she and Julian knew each other. They clung together like kids; you couldn’t have slid a penny between them. After about five minutes, it got to be a bit much.

“All right,” I said. “Time, gentleman, time.”

I put my hand on Julian’s shoulder, and he jumped like I’d given him an electric shock.

“What did you say?” he demanded. He had actually gone white.

“Just a joke,” I said. I looked over and saw good old Les had been the first to do something sensible. “Look, here’s Les with a round, let’s drink up and head back home, what do you think?”

Julian took the girl by the hand. “She’s coming with me.”

“Of course she is. ” I handed him a pint. Lesley had only brought five, I noted.

“We didn’t get much money,” she said. She looked angry. “I had to buy a round for Reg.”

Just as well, the wee girl didn’t seem like she’d be able to handle her drink. Seemed a bit stunned, deer in the headlamps.

I glanced around to see if anyone in the pub recognized her. She might have been someone’s kid. That wouldn’t go over well — rock and rollers coming in to kidnap their women and children.

But no one seemed to know her. If anything, they seemed to be making a point of not looking at her. Because of how she was dressed, I thought at the time. Or undressed. There were bits of stuff stuck to her feet. Dead leaves, I thought, but when I looked closer — and I wanted to look closer, believe me — it wasn’t leaves, but feathers.

That’s weird, I thought. Someone’s been in the henhouse.

I assumed she was some local character — you know, local halfwit or drug casualty, a poor thing everyone recognized but never spoke about. Not to her face, anyway. That’s why I thought only a couple quid got tossed in the hat.

It wasn’t because of Julian’s set, I’ll tell you that. He was magnificent. Even the punters were impressed; I heard them talking once they found their voices. They’d never heard the like. I’d never heard the like, and I saw Jimi Hendrix at an afterhours once with Jeff Beck and Sandy Denny. That night, Julian fucking blew them out of the water.

Tom Haring

Unsurprisingly, Lesley was the one blew the whistle on that gig. Very early Monday morning I got a phone call from her. Way too early for an ordinary phone call, not that I received many of those from anyone in Windhollow. I thought they’d run out of money again.

But that wasn’t why she rang. She gave me the rundown, said this strange girl had shown up two nights earlier at a pub gig and disappeared with Julian into his room. The two of them hadn’t been seen since.

Let me tell you, I wasn’t happy about Windhollow busking at the pub. But what’s done is done. As for Julian taking up with some little teenybopper, who cares? I certainly didn’t.

“Well, I just thought you should know,” said Lesley. I could hear her pouring something into a glass; she was hitting it pretty hard back then. “I haven’t seen him since Saturday night. Her either.”

“It doesn’t sound like we need to call Scotland Yard, Les. He’s needed a good lay since Arianna died. Go easy on him.”

I’d had no idea Lesley and Julian had been sleeping together, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so blunt. By the long silence that followed, I realized they must have been involved. Fuck, I thought, now Les will fall to pieces.

She didn’t, though. “My room’s next to theirs and I haven’t heard a peep,” she said. “They could be lying dead in there for all we know. That girl — I think she’s unstable.”

Now I did start to get anxious. Also angry. There’d been rumors of Julian and drugs but I’d tried to ignore them. This sounded like it might be something more serious, like maybe the girl had brought something with her — heroin or cocaine. Hard drugs.

“For Christ’s sakes, Les, why are you ringing me in London? Get Jonno and Ashton to break the door down! Or ring the police. No, wait—”

All I needed was some kind of Redlands drug scandal with musicians and a naked girl. Or an OD.

Or — and I feel guilty even saying this — something worse. Because Julian was the one who’d always struck me as unstable. Not dangerous, but tightly corked, the way upper-middle-class English guys could be.

Arianna’s suicide flashed before me. We only had Julian’s word that she had jumped to her death. There’d been an inquest, but no investigation. Julian’s father was well-placed and had some connections, and the whole tragic event had been dispensed with very quickly.

It hadn’t crossed my mind before, and god forgive me for saying it now. But at that moment I thought that perhaps Julian had killed Arianna. And now he’d killed this second girl.

“No, don’t do anything with the police,” I quickly told Lesley. “I’m coming up there, I’ll be as fast as I can. Just hold tight.”

I don’t know what I imagined I might do if it turned out that Julian really had killed someone. Spirit Les out of the country, at least. She was so young and an American to boot. I could just see the headlines: Innocent Yank seduced by decadent rockers, dead teenager in the room next door …

Of course, in the long term, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.

Lesley

I got off the phone with Tom and I was shaking. Booze was part of it — I needed a couple drinks before I got up the nerve to call him, especially that early on a Monday morning.

Still, it was more than drink made me shake. I was jealous, but I was even more frightened. There was something deeply unsettling about that girl. The way she looked and appeared out of nowhere; the way Julian reacted when he first saw her.

But also the way she stuck in my mind — like a song you can’t get out of your head. An earworm. She was like a brainworm. No matter how hard I tried not to think about her, I kept seeing that little white face and hair and those spooky eyes.

That’s what creeped me out the most — her eyes were so pale you couldn’t see what color they were. Not blue and not green, though you’d see flickers of those. Not grey, either. They were like water — they took on whatever color was around them. She’d flick her tongue out to lick her lips over and over, little bit of a tongue like a cat’s. Or a snake’s. There was something wrong about her, something horrible.

I was afraid to go into Julian’s room by myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake up anyone else. It was only six A.M.; they’d be furious.

And what was I going to say? “I’m worried because Julian’s been in there with that girl since Saturday night.” They’d just laugh at me.

So, I went alone. For a long time I stood in front of the door, listening. It was a very still morning, not a breath of wind. Sun shining, but I didn’t hear a bird outside and that seemed odd, too. You’d always hear birds at first light; they’d make such a racket you couldn’t fall back asleep. But that morning, nothing.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Ten minutes at least. Maybe longer. I was thinking maybe I’d go back for another splash of vodka, when I heard a noise from inside Julian’s room. Something soft struck the wall, just once. Not like someone knocking, more like something had been thrown. A kind of muffled sound, like whatever it was had been wrapped in cloth or newspaper.

I held my breath and listened for voices or someone moving around inside, but everything had gone silent. I was starting to think maybe I’d imagined it, when the sound came again, much louder this time.

Whatever it was had been thrown against the door in front of me. I jumped backward, and heard it again.

Whump. Whump. Whump.

After a minute, the sound stopped. I crept back to the door, and it started up again. Now the noise came from the other end of the room, by the window. I pressed my ear against the door and listened.

“Julian?” I whispered. Then louder, “Julian?”

I took a deep breath, put my hand on the knob, cracked the door open and peered inside. I saw nothing but the usual mess — clothes and books on the floor.

“Julian?”

No answer. I went inside, the door closing behind me.

The room was empty; the bed was empty. I can’t tell you what would have been worse, to see Julian dead or to see him in bed with that girl. But there was no one at all.

I stepped over a pile of books and saw Julian’s guitar leaning against the bed, as though he’d been playing it. The clothes he’d been wearing at the pub were on the floor. So was Jonno’s blue cape. The window was cracked open two or three inches. Everything was utterly still. The bed sheets were tossed around — it was obvious no one could be hiding there, but still I pulled back the coverlet.

Immediately I wished I hadn’t. There was blood on the bottom sheet — not much, just a few large drops, dried now. I yanked the coverlet back. I looked under the pillows — don’t ask me what I was looking for. I even rested my hand on the mattress, testing to see if it was warm.

Of course it wasn’t. Finally, I turned to look at the wall.

At first I thought Julian had scribbled there. It was covered in little dark jots and blots, like musical notes. The walls in our bedrooms were white plaster, and Will liked to write on his: ideas for songs, phone numbers, girl’s names.

But these marks weren’t ink or pencil. They were tiny dots of fresh blood, speckled across the plaster like someone had flicked a paintbrush at it.

The other wall was the same — and the ceiling, and the back of the door. Blood was spattered everywhere, not great splashes of it, but droplets, no bigger than a pinprick. My heart started pounding. I wanted to run for the door, but my legs were like jelly.

And then I heard it again, this time behind me — that same soft whump. My mouth was so dry that when I tried to scream, nothing came out. I turned.

A tiny dark blur hovered just outside the window, like a leaf blowing against the glass. Another whump, and the dark blur fell to the windowsill inside the room. A tiny bird, motionless.

Now I could move, and I did, very cautiously. The window glass was like the walls, spattered with blood. The dead bird lay on the sill. It would barely have filled my palm. Its feathers were reddish-brown, white at the breast. The wingtips were darker, almost black. Each toothpick leg had long, reddish claws. Eyes like poppy seeds. Its tiny beak wasn’t quite shut, and it was leaking blood. I leaned down and softly blew on it, but it didn’t stir.

I found a sheet of paper on the floor. I slid it beneath the dead bird, then slid the bird into my palm.

It didn’t weigh a thing. The feathers were so soft I could scarcely feel them. But when I drew it to my face to get a closer look, the tiny body shifted, and one of its claws pierced my palm.

It was like I’d been pricked by a hot needle. I yelped and dropped the bird back onto the windowsill, then stepped back and waited to see if the bird would move. Maybe it was playing dead.

Finally, I gave up and left. It wasn’t until I took a bath that evening that I saw the skin where its claw had pricked me was swollen, like I’d gotten a splinter. It hurt like hell, so badly I couldn’t play guitar for a week.

Then it burst, like a boil. Eventually it healed, but it left a scar. It still aches sometimes when I play.

Jon

Monday after we played the pub, Tom comes barreling back up to Wylding Hall in his car. I thought someone had died, he was driving so fast. Les had called him with some mad story about Julian and a girl, and Tom was shouting, “Are they dead? Are they dead?”

I had no idea what he was on about — why would they be dead? He stormed into the house, shouting and running upstairs, then down again. We’re all in the kitchen. Les had woken us up, raving on about Julian, but she didn’t tell us she’d rang up Tom. Tom grabbed Ashton first.

“Where’s Julian?”

Ashton looked at Tom like he was raving mad. “Julian? How the hell would I know? Did you look in his room?”

“He’s not there.”

“He probably took a walk then.” Now Ashton is the one with his knickers in a twist. “What’s this about? Why aren’t you in London?”

So, it comes out that Les had rung up Tom at the crack of dawn, woke him and told him Julian had gone missing with a girl from the pub. Ashton just about exploded — he did not like being waked up out of a sound sleep, even at the best of times. He started yelling at Les.

“Are you mad? Why’d you ring Tom? Because Julian took off with some bird? I would, too, if I had you dogging me all the time.”

“And me,” agreed Will. “You’re acting like a mad cow, Les.”

I didn’t weigh in — I felt sorry for Les. And I’m an early riser, so I was already up.

Well, you can imagine what happened next. Lesley fell apart, sobbing and wailing about what a bunch of bastards we all were, how Tom was the only one who cared about what happened to her or the band, and now even he had given up.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Tom snapped. “If I didn’t care, d’you think I’d be here? Christ. Is there any tea?”

“In a flash,” I said.

I made another pot of tea and some toasted cheese sandwiches. I wanted to get out of that room fast. But I knew that everyone would feel better once they got a bit of food in them.

Ashton

Jonno was the one saved the day that time. He was always looking out for everyone — you know, “Cuppa tea, mate?” or sharing his fags if you ran out. In he comes with tea and a tray of sandwiches and a couple of reefers, and we all eat and smoke a bit of weed and everyone starts to feel better. Except for Les, who went up to her room and refused to come down.

Truth is, often Lesley got the fuzzy end of the lollypop. Didn’t get enough credit for the songs she wrote or the arrangements she came up with, didn’t get credit for how much of our live performances she carried. Especially when Julian was around. He overshadowed everyone.

Later, she was the one became a big star. The rest of us might have been forgotten if it wasn’t for Wylding Hall. But we never took Lesley seriously enough.

And we absolutely didn’t take her seriously that morning. I mean, who would have? She was going on about birds flying around inside the house and someone bashing at the walls and Julian being murdered in his bed by that little groupie he’d picked up. But Tom had checked out his room and didn’t see anything strange. After a while, me and Jonno and Will went up, and Julian was gone, Lesley was dead right about that. But we didn’t find anything else.

Will

I just assumed Julian had taken off with the girl. Not for good, just for a stroll in the woods or down to the village. His car hadn’t moved. His room was empty. The bed looked like it’d been slept in. None of us was playing detective, it’s not like we searched for fingerprints or anything like that.

Ashton poked around under the bed — nothing there but old socks and scribbled notes for songs. There were books scattered everywhere, and Jonno started going through them. He was the one thinking most like a police detective. He found a couple of letters from Lesley, love letters, and a letter from Julian’s mum and dad back in Hampstead.

But nothing that might have belonged to the girl, and nothing like a note from Julian saying that he’d gone away. It all looked like he’d just stepped out for a smoke or a walk, the way he did most every morning.

Finally, Ashton threw a pillow at me. “This is a total waste of time,” he said. “He’ll be back for lunch, though if he’s smart about it he won’t bring the girl.” But he never came back.

Tom

I got there around noon. Everyone was in the kitchen, and they all looked out of sorts. I was out of sorts. There was a blowup because Lesley had called me — they never liked me coming down to check on them, and they thought I’d be angry that they’d played a gig at the pub without telling me. I was more concerned that something had happened to Julian. One of the boys said something to Lesley, I don’t remember what, but she flew off in tears. I thought it was best to leave her alone until I could figure out what the hell was going on. There was no sign of Julian, but so what?

“What about this girl, then?” I asked them.

All of a sudden everyone is very quiet. So, that’s the problem, I thought.

No one wants to tell me about her, and when finally Jonno pipes up, all I get is that a young girl had shown up at the pub and come back with Julian.

“Who is she?”

Jonno shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Neither did anyone else.

“What’s her name then?” I asked.

Again, nothing. I was exasperated, but I still wasn’t concerned. Pretty girl shows up, goes home with a musician — where’s the news in that? I was cheesed off about the pub gig, and I reamed them out about that, and then it was over.

Or so I thought.

I didn’t hang around. It was Monday, I’d postponed a meeting with some session musicians, and I needed to get back to London. I had a cup of tea and told them to let me know when Julian returned and to make their peace with Lesley. I told them I’d make room in the calendar for them to come into the studio in two weeks.

It was mid-August by then, and the lease on Wylding Hall only ran to the end of the month. Everything had seemed fine when I’d brought the mobile unit down just a few weeks earlier. Now I was worried that maybe things weren’t so rosy. I wanted to record the album before anyone got ideas about leaving the group.

On the way out to my car, I peeked into Julian’s Morris Minor to see if maybe he’d spent the night there. But it looked exactly as it had when he first arrived at the beginning of the summer.

Ashton

Of course, I blame myself. We all did, and still do. But you never expect something like this to happen, for someone to suddenly disappear without a trace. Every day, I thought he’d show up again. When a week went by and he hadn’t, I assumed he’d taken off with the girl.

I was furious: fucking Julian had scuttled everything. We couldn’t do the studio album without him. That was never on the table — it was inconceivable, then or now, that we could have done Wylding Hall without Julian. His guitar, his voice; all the songs he’d written.

And I am not downplaying Lesley’s contribution. She and Julian, their harmonies on “Windhover Morn” were exquisite. And she wrote three of the songs. But any one of us might have been replaced in the studio. Julian? Never.

Will

That Wednesday or Thursday I went down to the pub to ask the barman if he’d seen Julian. He had not. I asked about the girl, if she was a local girl from the village. He said he’d never seen her before, but that she might have been someone’s daughter, he just didn’t know. There were a couple geezers at the bar, but when I asked them about the girl, I got the fish-eye. One of them said something like, that’s what you get hunting birds out of season. I assumed he meant the girl was underage.

That freaked me out — I thought maybe the town elders had lynched Julian for going off with one of their kids. And that very well may be what happened. I didn’t stick around the pub after that.

Ashton

Will told us he thought one of the locals might have done something to Julian. That was the first time I thought that maybe this wasn’t going to end well.

Lesley

I waited a week, then rang the police. I will never forgive myself for not going to them sooner. But I was so angry at Will and Ashton and Jonno, especially Ashton, and I didn’t want to do anything that would give them any cause whatsoever to call me a hysterical female.

And I was angry at Julian, too — enraged and heartbroken. And that girl. If I had seen her, I would have throttled her.

The police did nothing. The sergeant actually laughed when I spoke to him on the telephone.

“Eh wot, love, you want us to mount a search for your boyfriend? Might be you should search for another bloke!”

The next day I made Jonno drive me to the police station in Canterbury. We went in and tried to file a missing persons report, but the police wouldn’t let us. In retrospect, we should have gotten dressed up — we looked like what we were, a couple of scruffy hippies. There was no way they were going to take us seriously.

When we got back to Wylding Hall, I told Will I thought he should call Julian’s parents — he knew them. He said if he did they’d freak out and he didn’t want to worry them for no reason. I told him it looked like there was definitely a reason. But he didn’t do it.

That’s when I rang up Tom again and told him that Julian still hadn’t returned, and I thought he should call Julian’s parents. He said he would, and he did, but he waited another week. By then it was too late.

Tom

It’s true, I did wait. I know how bad that sounds, but I saw no point in having them worry needlessly. Kids were always taking off back then, hitchhiking to Katmandu to find themselves. Julian told me once he wanted to visit Morocco to see what a different, more ancient culture was like. It would have been absolutely in character for him to do something like that without telling the rest of us, especially if there was a woman involved.

But I finally did ring them up. It went as you would expect. Julian’s father was very stiff-upper-lip, not unconcerned, but he thought that Julian very likely had decided to take a trip someplace. He was less sanguine about the girl. They were conservative people, Julian’s mum and dad, wait-for-marriage types.

His mother didn’t fall apart, but I could hear from her voice that she was distressed, especially when I told her that Julian’s car was still at Wylding Hall.

“Why wouldn’t he have taken the car?” she asked. “It makes no sense to me that he wouldn’t have taken the car.”

Next morning they called the police.

Lesley

The police did fuck-all to find Julian. They listened to his parents, and I’m sure they were more polite to them than to us, but they just kept saying he’d most likely gone off with some girl, and one day they’d show up back home with a grandbaby in tow.

Eventually, they did file it as a proper missing persons case. I don’t how long it was before they did that — several months at least. You could find out by checking the police department in Canterbury, if they keep records that far back. If they keep records at all. Fuckwits.

We were all back in London by then. Jonno was in touch with Billy Thomas, and Billy said there had been cops out to Wylding Hall. They questioned him and his grandfather — poor Silas! I asked if they’d questioned the men at the pub, but Jonno didn’t know.

They questioned us, eventually. Especially me. God’s own irony there: I was the only one thought he’d met with foul play, and I end up being the one they suspect of it. Course they didn’t find anything at all, with me or anyone else.

I think his parents kept hoping he’d come back. I don’t know as they ever had him declared dead or whatever it is you do. I mean, what would anyone do? It’s such a horrible thing, never knowing.

They’re both dead now, some years ago. He was their only child. They took great pride in the album, I know that. I only met them that once, when it was released and Tom had a party at the Moonthunder office. They were very nice, very normal, upper middle-class. That was in October; he’d only been gone two months, and we all still thought he’d be back. It was too awful to think anything else.

Jon

I really did think he’d come back. I still do — I know, it’s crazy, but I do. He always wanted to go to Morocco, we talked about that a lot. He had that album Brian Jones did before he died, The Pipes of Pan in Joujouka: mad old Arab men in the desert, playing flutes and drums. Ancient-sounding music. Julian and I used to get stoned and listen to it in my room. No one else could stand it, but Julian loved it. It sounded like music from the dawn of time, like what you’d get if you set a time machine for the Dark Ages.

To me, it seems entirely possible that he ran off to Morocco or Tangier and decided to stay there, like Paul Bowles or William Burroughs. Smoke hash all day, hang around the souk, play the oud. Julian would love that.

Will

That girl — there was something disturbed me about that girl. I’m with Lesley on that one.

Years later, Tricia Kenyon told me she’d seen a ghost at Wylding Hall that time she came down and interviewed us. She described it to me and I said, Good Christ, you saw the girl! She said that’s why she’d finally told me. When I asked her why she hadn’t said anything sooner, she just shook her head.

“No one would have believed me,” she said. “And besides, what difference would it have made?”

And you know, she was right on both counts.

Will

When Julian left, that was the beginning of the end. We didn’t know it right away — we kept thinking he’d reappear, and things would go back to the way they were.

But everything changed after that. It wasn’t just that we missed him, although we did. We needed him. Without Julian, there was no Windhollow Faire. There would be no second album. None of us was thinking he was gone for good, but we knew we couldn’t record the album without him.

But we couldn’t afford to wait. Tom had been talking us up back in London. Patricia Kenyon had written that piece for NME and they were eager to run it — they didn’t want to wait till the album was released. Tom was tearing his hair out; he’d booked studio time for us. And even though it was his studio, time is money. He wanted the new album to be out by the end of the year, so it would get a boost from Christmas shoppers.

None of us had gotten any kind of advance for a second album. Tom was out of pocket for the lease on Wylding Hall and all of our other expenses as well. We were all totally, utterly skint. And Tom was reluctant to throw any more money our way, especially as it looked like Windhollow’s second album was going to be delayed, if it was recorded at all.

So, there was a lot of tension about that, too. There was tension about everything. Those last few weeks at Wylding Hall were pretty miserable, all around.

The weather came down, too. All summer there’d been no rain; all of a sudden, it’s cold and pissing rain nonstop. The place was freezing, and water came in everywhere. We started seeing rats and mice and voles running through the halls, flushed out by the rain. It was like a biblical curse.

I finally rang up Tom and said, “I’m done.” It wasn’t the end of the month yet, but I could see nothing was going to happen down there, except maybe we’d kill each other out of frustration and sheer bad vibes. As I recall, he didn’t argue.

But he didn’t offer to drive down and help us pack up, either, or put a check in the post. I rang off with him, then rang Nancy and said, Come get me soon as you can. Bless her, she came the next day.

I told the others I’d help them pack whatever they wanted into the van, but after that I was gone. I was done. Done, done, done.

Ashton

Everything fell apart after Julian left, especially when we tried to rehearse. We were all thrown off-balance. As a person, Julian was so quiet, but his guitar moved under and within all we did. It was like a hidden tributary, and we didn’t know how much it gave to all of us until he was gone.

Will split first. We were all beginning to get paranoid around each other. Suspicious. There was a sense that any of us might have been to blame for Julian going missing. Did I say something that upset him? Did Lesley, or Jonno, or Will? It never crossed my mind that one of us might have hurt him — I mean, really hurt him. It was the police came up with that mad idea when they questioned Les. They talked to all of us, but they came down hardest on her.

And you can see why. She was the only one of us who might have had a motive to kill him, out of jealousy. A crime of the heart. Mind you, I never thought that, none of us did, except for the Alton police detective.

So Will left, and Les soon after. Will shacked up with Nancy at her flat in Brixton. Lesley didn’t have a place to stay, so she moved in with them. Jonno and I stuck around for another week or so. One morning, we just looked at each other and said, “Well that’s it, then.” We packed up whatever was left, which wasn’t much, threw it into the van and hit the road. I siphoned some petrol from Julian’s Morris Minor and left a note inside telling him I’d pay him back when I saw him. As far as I know, his car’s still there.