One June afternoon in 2009, a thin man dressed in black boarded a bus to Sligo, a small coastal town not far from the Irish border. Three days later, after a quiet weekend spent largely alone, the man was dead – his passing the first act of a mystery that has now baffled and compelled police forces, journalists, film-makers and internet sleuths for over a decade.
So begins “The Man Who Deleted His Past Before He Was Found Dead,” a Vice article by Francisco Garcia that has haunted me for nearly six years. The article tells the story of a man, known as Peter Bergmann (since that’s the false name he gave at the hotel) who can be seen on grainy CCTV footage disposing of all identifying documents so that, by the time his body washed up on a secluded Sligo beach, every trace of his past had been eradicated.
He made his way to the bus station and, on arriving, read notes on scraps of paper he’d picked out of his pocket, before tearing them up and depositing them in a nearby bin.
What did the notes say??! And who received the letters he was seen posting in the days before his death?
We will probably never know, but boy does that man’s story leave a mark. So many unanswerable questions.
But what does the death of the man known as Peter Bergmann have to do with the news that A STAR IS DEAD, MY SECOND BOOK, IS OUT?!
Well, I’ll get to that. I promise.
Death and hotels
When I started my first ever novel, I simply began writing1. A young woman walked into hotel on the south coast and tried to blag her way past the front desk to find out the room number of a rising British Hollywood star. I wanted the young woman to be a bit of a fraud, someone willing to live in the grey areas, someone who uses her natural gregariousness to get on the right side of people. Phil McGinty, the main character of my Aldhill Mysteries series came to life that day. She’s not perfect, but I can’t help liking her, youthful mistakes and all – and I hope you do too.
But Phil didn’t arrive alone. When she strode into the hotel that day, she came up against Judith ‘the dragon on the front desk’ a woman who has deployed a disarming smile herself in days gone by and isn’t about to fall for any of that nonsense.
And then, along with Judith and Phil, came a man who had caught a bus into town and booked himself into The Marchmont with a plan to remove all trace of himself from the world. Less the anonymous Man In Black, more the invisible Man In Beige. And, after the Man In Beige made his journey into the tale, a cast of other (more colourful) characters appeared, not least Oli Cromwell, the deeply flawed highly charismatic Aldhill-boy-turned-Hollywood-A-Lister whose mysterious death lies at the heart of the mystery.
A STAR IS DEAD was the first novel I ever wrote (or finished, I should say), although it has entered the world as book two in the Aldhill Mystery series. It was inspired by many things, but the story of the Sligo Man haunts its pages. I don’t know how to justify using the death of a real person as the inspiration for what is ultimately meant to be an entertaining story (just as I didn’t know how to feel about the poor man who inspired THE MAN IN THE WALL). I also don’t know how Peter Bergmann would feel if he discovered that, by attempting to delete all evidence of his very existence, he turned himself into a story that will live on in local folklore.
Anyway, brr, shake it off – this has all got a little bit grim, hasn’t it? (Do you think my slight aversion to darkness is going to be a hindrance to my crime writing career?) I hope you’re all having a lovely Tuesday, and that you’re in exactly the right mood to not only BUY MY BOOK, but also TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW ABOUT IT!
Paperback readers will need to wait a few weeks, but don’t worry, I will be banging on about it when it launches.