Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  “I’ve seen Don around. He’s been going out with Pamela Davis for about a year now. I think they might be engaged. He works in a garage on Kirkstall Road, near the viaduct. I remember Linda talking about having the baby adopted. I don’t think she planned on keeping it.”

  The mother would probably know, not that it mattered. Whoever had killed Linda Lofthouse, it wasn’t a two-year-old. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Linda?” he asked.

  “Not really,” said Carol. “I mean, I don’t know what you want to hear. We were best friends, but we sort of drifted apart, as you do. I don’t know what she got up to the last two years. I’m sorry to hear that she was killed, though. That’s terrible. Why would somebody do a thing like that?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Chadwick, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. He didn’t think it came over very well. He stood up. “Thanks for your time, and for the information.”

  “You’ll let me know? When you find out.”

  “I’ll let you know,” said Chadwick, standing up. “Please, stay here with the baby. I’ll let myself out.”

  “What’s up with you, then?” asked Cyril, the landlord of the Queen’s Arms, as Banks ordered a bitter lemon and ice late that afternoon. “Doctor’s orders?”

  “More like boss’s orders,” Banks grumbled. “We’ve got a new super. She’s dead keen and seems to have eyes in the back of her bloody head.”

  “She’ll get nowt out of me,” said Cyril. “My lips are sealed.”

  Banks laughed. “Cheers, mate. Maybe another time.”

  “Bad for business, this new boss of yours.”

  “Give us time,” said Banks, with a wink. “We’ll get her trained.”

  He took his glass over to a dimpled copper-topped table over by the window and contemplated its unappetizing contents gloomily. The ashtray was half full of crushed filters and ash. Banks pushed it as far away as he could. Now that he no longer smoked, he’d come to loathe the smell of cigarettes. He’d never noticed it before, as a smoker, but when he got home from the pub his clothes stank and he had to put them straight in the laundry basket. Which would be fine if he got around to doing his laundry more often.

  Annie turned up at six o’clock, as arranged. She’d been at Fordham earlier, Banks knew, and had talked to Kelly Soames. She got herself a Britvic Orange and joined him. “Christ,” she said, when she saw Banks’s drink. “They’ll be thinking we’re all on the wagon.”

  “Too true. Good day?”

  “Not bad, I suppose. You?”

  Banks swirled the liquid in his glass. Ice clinked against the sides. “I’ve had better,” he said. “Just come from the postmortem.”

  “Ah.”

  “No picnic. Never is. Even after all these years you never get quite used to it.”

  “I know,” said Annie.

  “Anyway,” Banks went on, “we weren’t far wrong in our original suspicions. Nick Barber was in generally good health apart from being bashed on the back of the head with a poker. It fits the wound, and Dr. Glendenning says he was hit four times, once when he was standing up, which accounts for most of the blood spatter, and three times when he was on the floor.”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “Overkill?”

  “Not necessarily. The doc said it needn’t have been a frenzied attack, just that whoever did it wanted to make sure his victim was dead. In all likelihood he’d have got a bit of blood on him, too, and blood’s hard to get rid of. It might give us something we can use in court if we ever catch the bastard. Anyway, there were no prints on the poker, so our killer obviously wiped it clean.”

  “What do you make of it all?”

  “I don’t know,” said Banks, sipping bitter lemon and pulling a face. “It certainly doesn’t look professional, and it wasn’t frenzied enough to look like a lovers’ quarrel, not that we can rule that out.”

  “I doubt if the motive was robbery, either.” Annie told Banks more detail than she had given him over the phone about her conversation with Kelly Soames and what little she had discovered about Barber from her.

  “And the timing is interesting,” Banks added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was he killed before or after the power cut? All the doc can tell us is that it probably happened between six and eight. One bloke left the pub at seven and came back around quarter past. The others bear this out, but nobody saw him in Lyndgarth. Banks consulted his notes. Name of Calvin Soames.”

  “Soames?” said Annie. “That’s the barmaid’s name. Kelly Soames. He must be her father. I recognized him when he dropped her off.”

  “That’s right,” said Banks.

  “She said he’s always in the pub when she’s working. I know she was terrified of him finding out about her and Nick.”

  “I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow.”

  “Go carefully, Alan. He didn’t know about her and Nick Barber. Apparently he’s a very strict father.”

  “That’s not such a terrible thing, is it? Anyway, I’ll do my best. But if he really did know…”

  “I understand,” said Annie.

  “And don’t forget Jack Tanner,” said Banks. “We don’t know what motive he might have had, but he had a connection with the victim, through his wife. We’d better check his alibi thoroughly.”

  “It’s being done,” said Annie. “Ought to be easy enough to check with his darts cronies. And I’ve got Kev following up on all the blokes who left the pub between the relevant times.”

  “Good. Now the tourist couple, the Browns, say they arrived at about a quarter to eight and thought they saw a car heading up the hill, right?”

  Annie consulted the notes she had taken in the incident van. “Someone from the youth hostel, a New Zealander called Vanessa Napier, told PC Travers that she saw a car going by at about half past seven or a quarter to eight on Friday evening, shortly after the lights went off. She was looking out of her window at the storm.”

  “Did she get any details?”

  “No. It was dark, and she doesn’t know a Honda from a Fiat.”

  “Doesn’t help us much, does it?”

  “It’s all we’ve got. They questioned everyone in the hostel and Vanessa’s the only one who saw anything.”

  “She’s not another one been shagging our Nick, too, has she?”

  Annie laughed. “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Hmm,” Banks said. “There seem to have been more comings and goings between half past seven and eight than there were earlier.”

  “Yorkshire Electricity confirms the power went out at seven twenty-eight p.m.”

  “The problem is,” Banks went on, “that if the killer came from some distance away and timed his arrival for half seven or a quarter to eight, he can’t have known there would be a power cut, so it’s not a factor.”

  “Maybe it gave him an opportunity,” Annie said. “They’re arguing, the lights go out, Nick turns to reach for his cigarette lighter and the killer seizes the moment and lashes out.”

  “Possibly,” said Banks. “Though the darkness would have made it a bit harder for him to search the cottage and be certain he took away everything he needed to. Also, your eyes need time to adjust. Look at the timing. Mrs. Tanner showed up at eight. That didn’t give him much time to search in the dark and check Barber’s car.”

  “He might have had a torch in his own vehicle.”

  “He’d still have had to go and get it. There would’ve been no reason for him to be carrying one if he arrived before the power cut.”

  “Does the electricity failure really matter, then?”

  “I think we can assume that the killer would have done what he came to do anyway, and if the lights went out, that just gave him a better opportunity.”

  “What about the Browns? Their timing is interesting.”

  “Yes,” said Banks. “But do they strike you as the types to kill someone and then drop by the local pub for a pint?”

/>   “It was dark. There was no electricity. Maybe the local was as good a place to hide as any.”

  “What about blood?”

  “Winsome checked after the lights came back on,” Annie said. “She didn’t see any signs, but they’d hardly have hung around till the lights came back on if they were hiding bloodstains. We could hardly strip-search everyone.”

  “True,” said Banks. “Look, we’ve still got a long way to go. You mentioned that Nick Barber was a writer?”

  “That’s what Kelly said he told her.”

  “Who’d want to kill a writer?”

  “There were plenty I wanted to kill when I was at school doing English,” said Annie, “but they were all dead already.”

  Banks laughed. “But seriously.”

  “Well, it depends what kind of writer he was, doesn’t it?” Annie argued. “I mean, if he was an investigative journalist onto something big, then someone might have had a reason to get rid of him.”

  “But what was he doing up here?”

  “There are plenty of cupboards full of skeletons in North Yorkshire,” countered Annie.

  “Yes, but where to begin? That’s the problem.”

  “Google?” suggested Annie.

  “That’s a start.”

  “And shouldn’t we be going to London?”

  “Monday morning,” said Banks. “Then we’ll be able to talk to his employer, if we can find out who it is. You know how useless Sundays are for finding anything out. I’ve asked the locals to keep an eye on the place until then to make sure no one tries to get in.”

  “What about next of kin?”

  “Winsome sorted that, too. They live just outside Sheffield. They’ve already been informed. I thought you and Winsome could go and talk to them tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” said Annie. “I was only going to wash my hair, anyway. Oh, there’s one more thing. About that book.”

  “Yes?”

  “It looks as if he might have bought it just over the road here. Kelly said she met him coming out of the secondhand bookshop.”

  Banks consulted his watch. “Damn, it’ll be closed now.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Could be. It didn’t look as if the figures were written in the same hand as the price, but you never know.”

  “We can ring the owner at home, I suppose.”

  “Good idea,” said Banks.

  “From the way you’re still sitting there, I assume you’re expecting me to do it?”

  “If you would. Look, I’m sick of this bloody bitter lemon. As far as I’m concerned, we’re off duty, working on our own time, and if Lady Gervaise wants to make something of it, then good luck to her. I’m having a pint. You?”

  Annie smiled. “Spoken like a true rebel. I’ll have the same. And while you’re getting them in…” She took her mobile phone from her briefcase and waved it in the air.

  Banks had to wait until a party of six tourists, who couldn’t make up their minds what they wanted to drink, had been served, and when he got back with two foaming pints of Black Sheep, Annie had finished. “Well, he certainly didn’t do it,” she said. “Fair bristled at the idea of anyone writing anything but the price in books, even the blank pages at the back. Sacrilege, he said. Anyway, he remembers the book. It only came in the day before Nick Barber bought it last Wednesday, and he checks them all thoroughly. There was nothing written in the back then.”

  “Interesting,” said Banks. “Very interesting indeed. We’ll just have to wait and see what young Gavin makes of it, won’t we?”

  Saturday, 13th September, 1969

  Yvonne sat upstairs at the front of a number 16 bus heading for the city center chewing on her fingernails and wondering what to do. Some clever sod had taken a marker to the NO SPITTING sign and altered it to read NO SHITTING. Yvonne lit a cigarette and pondered her dilemma. If she was right, it could be serious.

  It had happened the previous evening, when her father came home late from work, as usual. He’d been taking something out of his briefcase when a photograph had slipped to the floor. He’d put it back quickly and obviously thought she hadn’t seen it, but she had. It was a picture of the dead girl, the one who had been stabbed on Sunday at the Brimleigh Festival, and with a shock, Yvonne had realized she recognized her: Linda.

  She didn’t know Linda well, had only met her once and hadn’t really talked with her much. But the local hippie community was small enough that if you hung around the right places for long enough, you’d come across pretty much everyone in the scene eventually, whether at the Grove, the Adelphi, the Peel or one of the student pubs on Woodhouse Lane, in Hyde Park or Headingley. Even as far away as the Farmer’s Inn, where they had blues bands like Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, Free and Jethro Tull on a Sunday night. You could also be damn sure that they’d all beg, borrow or steal to get to an event with a lineup like the Brimleigh Festival. So, when you thought about it, Linda being there wasn’t quite so much a coincidence as it appeared on the surface. The thing was, you didn’t expect to get killed there; it was supposed to be a peaceful event, a gathering of the tribes and a celebration of unity.

  The bus lumbered down Tong Road, past the Lyric, which was advertising a double bill of last year’s Carry On Up the Khyber and Carry On Camping. What crap, Yvonne thought. It was a gray day, and light rain pattered against the windows. Rows of grim back-to-back terraces sloped up the hill toward Hall Lane, all dark slate roofs and dirty red brick. A couple of kids got on at the junction with Wellington Road, behind the Crown, by the flats, and took the other front seat.

  They’d filmed part of Billy Liar there a few years ago, Yvonne remembered, while it was a wasteland of demolished houses before the flats were built. Yvonne had been about eight, and her father had brought her down to watch. She had ended up in one of the crowd scenes waving a little flag as Tom Courtenay drove through in his tank, but when she had watched the film, she couldn’t see herself anywhere.

  The kids lit cigarettes, kept looking over at her and making cheeky remarks. Yvonne ignored them.

  She had met Linda at Bayswater Terrace one evening during the summer holidays. She had got the impression that it was just a flying visit, that Linda used to live there for a while but had moved to London. Linda was really fantastic, she remembered. She actually knew some of the bands and hung around with lots of rock stars at clubs and other “in” places. She wasn’t a groupie – she made that clear – she just liked the music and the guys who played it. Yvonne remembered someone saying that one of the members of the Mad Hatters was Linda’s cousin, but she couldn’t remember which one.

  Linda even played a bit of guitar herself. She had sat down that evening with an acoustic and played “As Tears Go By” and “Both Sides Now.” Not a bad voice, either, Yvonne had thought, a little in awe of her and that sort of luminous haze her long blond hair and the long white dress she wore created around her pale features. The guys were all in love with her, you could tell, but she wasn’t interested in any of them. Linda didn’t belong to anyone. She was her own person. She also had a great throaty laugh, which surprised Yvonne, coming from one who looked so demure, like Marianne Faithfull.

  McGarrity had been there that night, Yvonne remembered, and even he had seemed subdued, keeping his knife in his pocket for once and refraining from muttering T. S. Eliot all evening. The guy they said was organizing the Brimleigh Festival, Rick Hayes, had also been present, which was how they managed to score some free tickets. He knew Linda from down in London and seemed to know Dennis, too, whose house it was. Yvonne hadn’t liked Hayes. He had tried to get her to go upstairs with him and got a bit stroppy when she wouldn’t.

  That was the only time Yvonne and Linda had met, and they hadn’t talked much, but Linda had made an impression. Yvonne was waiting for her O-level results, and Linda had said something about exams not proving anything and the real truth of what you were was inside you. That made sense to Yvonne. Now Linda was dead. Stabbed. Yvonne felt tears pr
ick her eyes. She could hardly believe it. One of her own. She hadn’t seen her during the festival, but that wasn’t surprising.

  The bus carried on past the gasworks, over the canal and river and past the huge building site where they were putting up the new Yorkshire Post building at the corner of Wellington Street, then past the dark, high Victorian buildings to City Square, where Yvonne got off. There were a couple of new boutiques she wanted to visit and that little record shop down the ginnel off Albion Street might still have a copy of the Blind Faith LP. Her parents hadn’t let her go to the free concert in London’s Hyde Park last June, but at least she could enjoy the music on record. Later she was going over to Carberry Place to meet up with Steve and have a few tokes. A bunch of them were going to the Peel that night to see Jan Dukes de Grey. Derek and Mick were quite the local celebrities and they were like real people; they’d talk to you and sign their first LP cover, Sorcerers, not hide away backstage like rock stars.

  Yvonne’s problem persisted, though: whether or not to tell her father about Linda. If she did, the police would be at Bayswater Terrace like a shot. Maybe Dennis and Martin and Julie and the others would get busted. And it would be her fault. If they found out, they’d never speak to her again. She was sure that none of them could have had anything to do with what happened to Linda, so why bring grief on them? Rick Hayes was a creep and McGarrity was weird, but neither of them would kill one of their own. How could knowing about Linda being at Bayswater Terrace in July possibly help the police investigation? Her father would find out who Linda was eventually – he was good at finding things out – but it wouldn’t be from her, and nobody would be able to blame her for what happened.

  That was what she decided in the end, turning the corner into the wet cobbled ginnel; she would keep it to herself. There was no way she was going to the pigs, even if the chief pig was her father.