Monday, 15th September, 1969
After a meeting with Bradley, Enderby and Detective Chief Superintendent McCullen later on Monday morning, Chadwick invited Geoff Broome for a lunchtime sandwich and pint at the pub across from Park Lane College. Most of the students hung out in the slightly more posh lounge, but the public bar was Chadwick’s domain, and that of a few old-age pensioners who sat quietly playing dominoes over their halves of mild. With a couple of pints of Webster’s Pennine Bitter beside them, and a plate of roast beef sandwiches each, Chadwick brought Broome up-to-date on the Linda Lofthouse murder.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this, Stan,” said Broome, finishing his sandwich and taking out a packet of ten Kensitas, tapping one on the table and lighting it. “It doesn’t sound like a drug-related killing to me.”
Chadwick watched Broome inhale and exhale and felt the familiar urge he thought he’d vanquished six years ago when the doctor found a shadow on his lung that turned out to be tuberculosis and cost him six months in a sanitarium.
“Smoke bothering you?” Broome asked.
“No, it’s all right.” Chadwick sipped some beer. “I’m not saying it’s a drug-related murder, but drugs might play a part in it, that’s all. I was just wondering whether you might be able to help me find out who the girl’s contacts in Leeds were. You know that scene far better than I do.”
“Of course, if I can,” said Broome. As usual, his hair looked disheveled and his suit looked as if it had been slept in. All of which might have masked the fact that he was one of the best detectives in the county. Perhaps not good enough to detect that his wife had been having it off with a vacuum-cleaner salesman behind his back, but good enough to reduce significantly the amount of illegal drugs entering into the city. He also ran one of the most efficient networks of undercover officers, and his many paid informants within the drugs community knew they could depend on absolute anonymity.
Chadwick told him what Donald Hughes had said about visiting the house in one of the Bayswaters.
“I can’t say anything springs immediately to mind,” said Broome, “but we’ve had call to visit that neighborhood once in a while. Let me do a bit of fishing.”
“Bloke called Dennis,” said Chadwick. “And it’s maybe Terrace or Crescent. That’s all I know.”
Broome jotted the name and streets down. “You really think it’s not just some random nutcase?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Chadwick answered. “If you look at the crime, what we know of it, that’s certainly a possibility. Until we know more about the girl’s background and movements and whether she was drugged or not, for example, we can’t really say much more. She was stabbed five times, so hard that the knife hilt bruised her chest and the blade cut off a piece of her heart. But there were no signs of any sort of struggle in the surrounding grass, and the bruising around her neck is minimal.”
“Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel? Lovers kill each other all the time, Stan. You know that.”
“Yes, but they’re usually a bit more obvious about it. Like I said, this has more deliberate elements. The killer stood behind her, for a start.”
“So she’s leaning back on him. She felt safe. What about her boyfriend?”
“Didn’t have one, so far as we know. She had an ex-boyfriend, Donald Hughes, but his alibi checks out. He was working most of the night on a rush job at the garage where he works, and he wouldn’t have had time to go anywhere near Brimleigh.”
“Someone else close to her, then?”
“I suppose there’s a chance she knew her killer,” Chadwick admitted, “that it was someone she felt familiar with, felt comfortable with. Why he did it is another matter entirely. But to find out any more we need to track down her friends.”
“Well, I can’t promise anything but I’ll see what I can do,” said Broome. “Good Lord, is that the time? Must dash. I have to see a man about a shipment of Dexedrine.”
“All go, isn’t it?”
“You can say that again. What’s next on your agenda? Why so gloomy?”
“I’ve got an appointment with their royal majesties the Mad Hatters this afternoon,” Chadwick said.
“Lucky you. Maybe they’ll give you a free LP.”
“They know what they can do with it.”
“Think of Yvonne, though, Stan. You’d be golden in her eyes, you met the Mad Hatters and got a signed LP.”
“Get away with you.”
“I’ll come back to you about the house,” Broome said, then left.
Broome’s cigarette butt still smoldered in the ashtray. Chadwick put it out. That made his fingers smell of smoke, so he went to the toilet and washed them before sitting down to finish his drink. He could hear a group of students in the lounge laughing over Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” on the jukebox, a song Chadwick actually quite liked when he heard it on the radio. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get a signed LP for Yvonne, he thought, then immediately dismissed the idea. A lot of good that would do for his authority, begging a bunch of drug-addled layabouts for their autographs.
Chadwick tried to picture the twenty-five thousand kids at the Brimleigh Festival all sitting in the dark listening to a loud band on a distant lit-up stage. He knew he could narrow his range of suspects if he tried hard enough, especially now that he had a more accurate idea of the time of the murder. For a start, Rick Hayes was still holding something back, he was certain of it. The candid photographs proved that Linda Lofthouse had been in the backstage area, and that she had talked with two members of the Mad Hatters, among others. Hayes must have known this, but he didn’t say anything. Why? Was he protecting someone? On the other hand, Chadwick remembered that Hayes himself was left-handed, like the killer, so if he knew more than he was telling…
Still, he admonished himself, no point in too much theorizing ahead of the facts. Imagination had never been his forte, and he had seen enough to know that the details of the murder did not necessarily give any clues as to the killer’s state of mind, or to his relationship with the victim. People were capable of strange and wondrous behavior, and some of it was murderous. He finished his pint and went back to the station. He would get DC Bradley to give the boffins a gentle nudge while he went out to Swainsview Lodge with young Enderby.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Banks hadn’t been to London since Roy’s death, or since the terrible tube and bus suicide bombings that summer, and he was surprised, getting off the GNER InterCity at King’s Cross that lunchtime, at how just being there brought a lump to his throat. It was partly Roy, of course, and partly some deep-rooted sense of outrage at what the place had suffered.
King’s Cross Station was the usual throng of travelers standing gazing up at the boards like people looking for alien spacecraft. There was nowhere to sit; that was the problem. The station authorities didn’t want to encourage people to hang around the station; they had enough problems with terrorists, teenage prostitution and drugs as it was. So they let the poor buggers stand while they waited for their trains.
A uniformed constable met Banks and Annie at the side exit, as arranged, and whisked them in a patrol car through the streets of central London to Cromwell Road and along the Great West Road, past the roadside graffiti-scored concrete-and-glass towers of Hammersmith to Nick Barber’s Chiswick flat, not far from Fuller’s Brewery. It was a modern brick low-rise building, three stories in all, and Barber had lived at the top in one of the corner units. The police locksmith was waiting for them.
When the paperwork had been completed and handed over, the lock yielded so quickly to the smith’s ministrations that Banks wondered whether he had once used his skills to less legitimate ends.
Banks and Annie found themselves standing in a room with purple walls, on which hung a number of prints of famous psychedelic poster art: Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall at Winterland, 1 February, 1968; Buffalo Springfield at the Fillmore Auditorium, 21 December, 1967; the Mad Hatters at the Roundhouse
, Chalk Farm, 6 October, 1968. Mixed with these were a number of framed sixties album covers: Cheap Thrills, Disraeli Gears, Blind Faith, Forever Changes and Sir Peter Blake’s infamous Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Custom shelving held a formidable collection of CDs and LPs, and the stereo equipment was top of the line Bang amp; Olufsen, as were the Bose headphones resting by the leather armchair.
There were far too many CDs to browse through, but on a cursory glance Banks noticed a prevalence of late-sixties to early-seventies rock, stopping around Bowie and Roxy Music, and including some bands he hadn’t thought of in years, like Atomic Rooster, Quintessence, Dr. Strangely Strange and Amazing Blondel. There was also a smattering of jazz, mostly Miles, ’Trane and Mingus, along with a fair collection of J. S. Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart.
One shelf was devoted to magazines and newspapers in which Nick Barber had published reviews or features, and quickie rock bios. Some recent correspondence, mostly bills and junk mail, sat on a small worktable under the window. There was no desktop computer, Banks noticed, which probably meant Barber did all his work on the fly on his laptop, which had been taken.
The bedroom was tidy and functional, with a neatly made double bed and a wardrobe full of clothes, much the same as the ones he’d had with him in Yorkshire: casual and not too expensive. There was nothing to indicate any interests other than music, apart from the bookshelves, which reflected fairly catholic tastes in modern fiction, from Amis to Wodehouse, with a few popular science-fiction, horror and crime novels mixed in – Philip K. Dick, Ramsey Campbell, Derek Raymond, James Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Elroy and George Pelecanos. The rest were books about rock and roll: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Peter Guralnick.
A filing cabinet in a corner of the bedroom held copies of contracts, lists and reviews of concerts attended, expense sheets and drafts of articles, all of which would have to be taken away and examined in detail. For the moment, though, Banks found what he needed to know in a brief note in the “Current” file referring to “the matter we discussed” and urging Barber to go ahead and get started. It also reminded him that they didn’t pay expenses up front. The notepaper was headed with the MOJO logo and an address at Mappin House, on Winsley Street in the West End. It was dated 1st October, just a couple of weeks before Nick Barber left for Yorkshire.
There were several messages on Nick’s answering machine: two from an anxious girlfriend, who left him her work number, said she hadn’t seen him for a while and wanted to get together for a drink; another from a mate about tickets to a Kasabian concert; and one offering the deal of the century on double-glazing. As far as Banks could see, Nick Barber had kept his life clean and tidy and taken most of it with him on the road. Now it had disappeared.
“We’d better split up,” he said to Annie. “I’ll try the MOJO offices and you see if you can get any luck with the girl who left her work number. See if there’s anything else you can find around the flat that might tell us anything about him, too, and arrange to have the files and stuff taken up to Eastvale. I’ll take the tube and leave you the driver.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “Where shall we meet up?”
Banks named an Italian restaurant in Soho, one he was sure they hadn’t been to together before, so it held no memories for them. They’d have to take a taxi or the tube back to their hotel, which was some distance away, just off Cromwell Road, not too far from the magnificent Natural History Museum. It was clean, they had been assured, and unlikely to break the tight police budget. As Annie busied herself listening to Barber’s phone messages again, Banks left the flat and headed for the underground.
Melanie Wright dabbed at her cheeks and apologized to Annie for the second time. They were sitting in a Starbucks near the Embankment, not far from where Melanie worked as an estate agent. She said she could take a break when Annie called, but when she found out about Nick Barber’s murder, she got upset and her boss told her she could take the rest of the afternoon off. If Nick had a “type,” then Annie was at a loss to know what it was. Kelly Soames was gamine, pale and rather naive, whereas Melanie was shapely, tanned and sophisticated. Perhaps the only similarities were that both were a few years younger than him, and both were blondes.
“Nick never let anyone get really close to him,” Melanie said over a Frappuccino, “but that was okay. I mean, I’m only twenty-four. I’m not ready to get married yet. Or even to live with someone, for that matter. I’ve got a nice flat in Chelsea I share with a girlfriend, and we get on really well and give each other lots of space.”
“But you did go out with Nick?”
“Yes. We’d been seeing one another for a year or so now, on and off. I mean, we weren’t exclusive or anything. We weren’t even what you’d call a couple, really. But we had fun. Nick was fun to be with, most of the time.”
“What do you mean, most of the time?”
“Oh, he could be a bit of a bore when he got on his hobbyhorse. That’s all. I mean, I wasn’t even born when the bloody sixties happened. It wasn’t my fault. Can’t stand the music, either.”
“So you didn’t share his enthusiasm?”
“Nobody could. It was more than an enthusiasm with him. I mean, I know this sounds weird, because he was really cool and I got to meet all sorts of bands and stuff – I mean, we even had a drink with Jimmy Page once at some awards do. Can you believe it? Jimmy Page! Even I know who he is. But even though it all sounds really cool and everything, being a rock writer and meeting famous people, when you get right down to it, it’s a bit like having any kind of all-consuming hobby, isn’t it. I mean, it could have been train-spotting, or computers or something.”
“Are you saying Nick was a bit of a nerd?”
“In some ways. Of course, there was more to him than that, or I wouldn’t have hung around. Nerds aren’t my type.”
“It wasn’t just for the bands, then?”
She shot Annie a sharp, disapproving glance. “No. I’m not like that, either. We really had fun, me and Nick. I can’t believe he’s gone. I’ll miss him so much.” She dabbed at her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Melanie,” said Annie. “I don’t mean to be insensitive or anything, but in this job you tend to get a bit cynical. When was the last time you saw Nick?”
“It must have been about two weeks ago, a bit over.”
“What did you do?”
She gave Annie a look. “What do you think we did?”
“Before that.”
“We had dinner.”
“At his place?”
“Yeah. He was a fair chef. Liked watching all those cooking programs on TV. Can’t stand them myself. You ask me what I can make, and I say reservations.”
Annie had heard it before, but she laughed anyway. “Was there anything different about him?”
Melanie thought for a moment, frowning, then she said, “It was just a feeling I got, really. I mean, I’d been around him before when he was pitching for a feature. It always mattered to him – I mean, he loved it – but this time, he was sort of anxious. I don’t think he’d got the green light yet.”
“Why do you think he was anxious? That he wouldn’t get the assignment?”
“Maybe it was partly that, but I think it was more that it was personal.”
“Personal?”
“Yeah. Don’t ask me why. I mean, Nick was fanatical about all his projects, and secretive about the details, but I got the sense that this one was a little more personal for him.”
“Did he tell you what, or who, he was working on?”
“No. But he never did. I don’t know if he thought I’d tell someone else who’d get to it first, but, like I said, he was always secretive until he’d finished. Used to disappear for weeks on end. Never told me where he was going. Not that he had any obligation to, mind you. I mean, it’s not like we were joined at the hip or anything.”
“Did he say anything at all about it?”
“Just once, that last night.” She gave a little laugh. “It wa
s a funny sort of thing to say. He said it was a very juicy story and it had everything, including murder.”
“Murder? He actually said that?”
Melanie started crying again. “Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t think he meant his own.”
Monday, 15th September, 1969
The Mad Hatters, Enderby explained as he negotiated the winding country roads with seeming ease, consisted of five members: Terry Watson on rhythm guitar and vocals, Vic Greaves on keyboards and backup vocals, Reg Cooper on lead guitar, Robin Merchant on bass and vocals and Adrian Pritchard on drums. They had formed about three years ago after they met at Leeds University, and so were considered a local band, though only two of them – Greaves and Cooper – actually came from Yorkshire. For the first year or so they played only gigs around the West Riding, then a London promoter happened to catch one of their shows at a Bradford pub and decided they’d fill a niche in the London scene with their unique blend of psychedelic pastoral.
“Hold on a minute,” said a frustrated Chadwick. “What on earth is ‘psychedelic pastoral’ when it’s at home?”
Enderby smiled indulgently. “Think of Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh set to rock music.”
Chadwick winced. “I’d rather not. Go on.”
“That’s about all, sir. They caught on, got bigger and bigger, and now they’ve got a best-selling LP out, and they’re hobnobbing with rock’s élite. They’re tipped for even bigger things. Roger Waters from Pink Floyd was telling me just yesterday in Rugby that he thought they’d go far.”
Chadwick was already getting tired of Enderby’s name-dropping since the weekend, and he wondered if it had been a mistake to send him down to interview the Brimleigh Festival groups who were appearing in Rugby. He hadn’t even found out anything of interest in two days, and reported that there had only been about three hundred people there. And he still hadn’t got a haircut. “What the hell does Lord Jessop have to do with this?” he asked, changing the subject. “This place does belong to him, doesn’t it?”
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