Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  They all sat on sturdy hard-backed chairs around the table. Calvin Soames muttered something about work and headed out, but Templeton called him back. “This concerns you, too, Mr. Soames,” he said. “Please sit down.”

  Soames let a moment pass, then he sat.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Kelly. “I’ve told you everything already.”

  “Well, that’s just it, you see,” said Templeton. “Being the untrusting detectives that we are, we don’t take anything at face value, or on first account. It’s like first impressions, see, they can so often be wrong. Any chance of a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” said Kelly.

  She was definitely fit, Templeton thought, as he watched her move toward the range with just the barest swinging of her hips, encased in tight jeans. Her waist was slender as a wand and she wore a jet belly-piercing, which made a nice contrast to her pale skin. Her blond hair was tied back, but a few tresses had escaped and framed her pale oval face. Her breasts moved tantalizingly under the short yellow T-shirt, and Templeton guessed that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Lucky bugger, that Barber, Templeton thought. If the last thing on earth he had done was shag Kelly Soames, then it can’t have been such a bad way to go. He began to wonder if, perhaps when they’d got this business over and done with, he might be in with a chance himself.

  When the tea was served, Winsome took out her notebook and Templeton sat back in his chair. “Right,” he said. “Now, you, Mr. Soames, returned back here at about seven o’clock on Friday evening. Am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “To check if you’d turned off the gas ring?”

  “It’s sometimes on so low,” he answered, “that a puff of air would blow it out. A couple of times I’ve come home and smelled gas. I thought it best to check, as I don’t live far from the Cross Keys.”

  “About a five-minute drive each way, is that right?”

  “About that, aye.”

  “And you, Miss Soames, you were working at the Cross Keys all evening, right?”

  Kelly chewed her thumbnail and nodded.

  “How long have you been working there?”

  “About two years now. There’s not much else to do around here.”

  “Ever thought of moving to the big city?”

  Kelly looked at her father and said, “No.”

  “Nice place to work, is it, the Cross Keys?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Good spot to meet lads?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, come on, Kelly. You’re a barmaid. You must meet lots of lads, get chatted up a lot, nice-looking girl like you.”

  She blushed at that, and the ghost of a smile crossed her face, Templeton noticed. Maybe he was in with a chance after all. As Calvin Soames looked on, the frown deepened on his forehead in a series of lines down to the bridge of his nose.

  “Do they tell you their troubles?” Templeton went on. “How their wives don’t understand them and they’re wasted on the jobs they’re doing?”

  Kelly shrugged. “Sometimes,” she said. “When it’s quiet.”

  “What do you do for fun?”

  “Dunno. Go out with my mates, I suppose.”

  “But where do you go? There’s not exactly a lot for a young girl to do around here, is there? It can’t be very exciting.”

  “There’s Eastvale.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m sure you enjoy a Saturday night out in Eastvale with the lads, listening to dirty jokes, getting bladdered and puking your guts up with the rest of them around the market cross. No, I mean, a girl like you, there must be something better, something more. Surely?”

  “There’s dances sometimes, and bands,” Kelly said.

  “Who do you like?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Come on, you must have a favorite.”

  She shifted in her chair. “I dunno, really. Keane. Maybe.”

  “Ah, Keane.”

  “You know them?”

  “I’ve heard them,” said Templeton. “Nick Barber was really into bands, wasn’t he?”

  Kelly seemed to tense up again. “He said he liked music,” she said.

  “Didn’t he say he could get you into all the best concerts down in London?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never been to London.”

  Templeton felt Winsome’s gaze boring into the side of his head. Her legs were crossed, and one of them was twitching. She clearly didn’t like the way he was drawing the interview out, postponing the moment of glory. But he was enjoying himself. He closed in for the kill.

  “Did Nick Barber promise to take you there?”

  “No.” Kelly shook her head, panic showing on her face. “Why would he do that?”

  “Gratitude, perhaps?”

  Calvin Soames’s face darkened. “What are you saying, man?”

  Templeton ignored him. “Well, Kelly?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about. I only talked to him at the bar when he ordered his drink. He was nice, polite. That’s all.”

  “Oh, come off it, Kelly,” said Templeton. “We happen to know that you slept with him on two occasions.”

  “What-” Calvin Soames tried to get to his feet but Templeton gently pushed him back down. “Please stay where you are, Mr. Soames.”

  “What’s this all about?” Soames demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Wednesday evening and Friday afternoon,” Templeton went on. “A bit of afternoon delight. Beats the dentist’s any day, I’d say.”

  Kelly was crying now and her father was fast turning purple with fury. “Is this true, Kelly?” he asked. “Is what he’s saying true?”

  Kelly buried her face in her hands. “I feel sick,” she said between her fingers.

  “Is this true?” her father demanded.

  “Yes! All right, damn you, yes!” she said, glaring at Templeton. Then she turned to her father. “He fucked me, Daddy. I let him fuck me. I liked it.”

  “You whoring slut!” Soames raised his hand to slap her but Winsome grabbed it first. “Not a good idea, Mr. Soames,” she said.

  Templeton looked at Soames. “Are you telling me you didn’t already know this, Mr. Soames?” he said.

  Soames bared his teeth. “If I’d’ve known I’d have…”

  “You’d have what?” Templeton asked, shoving his face close to Soames’s. “Beat up your daughter? Killed Nick Barber?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Is that what you did? You found out what Kelly had been doing, and you waited until she was back working behind the bar, then you made an excuse to leave the pub for a few minutes. You went to see Barber. What happened? Did he laugh at you? Did he tell you how good she was? Or did he say she meant nothing to him, just another shag? Was the bed still warm from their lovemaking? You hit him over the head with a poker. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him. Maybe something just snapped inside you. It happens. But there he was, dead on the floor. Is that how it happened, Calvin? If you tell us now it’ll go better for you. I’m sure a judge and jury will understand a father’s righteous anger.”

  Kelly lurched over to the sink and just made it in time. Winsome held her shoulders as the girl heaved.

  “Well?” said Templeton. “Am I right?”

  Soames deflated into a sad, defeated old man, all the anger drained out of him. “No,” he said, without inflection. “I didn’t kill anyone. I had no idea…” He looked at Kelly bent over the sink, tears in his eyes. “Not till now. She’s no better than her mother was,” he added bitterly.

  Nobody said anything for a while. Kelly finished vomiting and Winsome poured her a glass of water. They sat down at the table again. Her father wouldn’t look at her. Finally, Templeton got to his feet. “Well, Mr. Soames,” he said. “If you change your mind, you know where to get in touch with us. And in the meantime, as they say in the movies, don’t leave town.” He pointed at Kelly. “Nor you, young lady.”

&nb
sp; But nobody was looking at him, or paying attention. They were all lost in their own worlds of misery, pain and betrayal. That would pass, though, Templeton knew, and he’d see Kelly Soames again under better circumstances, he was certain of it.

  Outside at the car, dodging the puddles and mud as best he could, Templeton turned to Winsome, rubbed his hands together and said, “Well, I think that went pretty well. What do you think, Winsome? Do you think he knew?”

  Banks had a great deal of information to digest, he thought as he parked down by the Co-Op store at the inner harbor and walked toward the shops and restaurants of West Cliff. He passed a reconstruction of the yellow-and-black HMS Grand Turk, used in the Hornblower TV series, and stood for a moment admiring the sails and rigging. What a hell of a life it must have been at sea back then, he thought. Maybe not so bad if you were an officer, but for the common sailor: the bad, maggot-infested food, the floggings, the terrible wounds of battle, butchery thinly disguised as surgery. Of course, he’d got most of his ideas from Hornblower and Master and Commander, but they seemed pretty accurate to him, and if they weren’t, how would he know?

  Thinking back on what Keith Enderby had just told him, he realized he would have been living in Notting Hill at around the same time as Linda Lofthouse and Tania Hutchison. He was sure he would have remembered seeing someone as beautiful as Tania, even though she wasn’t famous then, but he couldn’t. There were, he remembered, a lot of beautiful young women in colorful clothes around at the time, and he had met his fair share of them.

  But Tania and Linda would have moved in very different circles. Banks didn’t know anyone in a band, for a start; he paid for all his concert tickets, like everyone else he knew. He also didn’t have the musical talent to perform in local clubs, though he often went to listen to those who did. But most of all, perhaps, was that he had always felt like an outsider, had felt, somehow, merely on the fringes of it all. He never wore his hair too long; couldn’t get much beyond wearing a flowered shirt or tie, let alone caftans and beads; couldn’t bring himself to join in the political demonstrations; and most times he found himself involved in any sort of counterculture conversation he thought it all sounded simplistic, childish and boring.

  Banks leaned on the railing and watched the fishing boats bobbing at anchor in the harbor, then he walked to a café he remembered that served excellent fish and chips, one thing you could usually rely on in Whitby. He went into the café, which was almost empty, and ordered a pot of tea and jumbo haddock and chips, with bread and butter for chip butties, from a bored young waitress in a black apron and white blouse.

  He sat down at the window, which looked out over the harbor to the old part of town, with its 199 steps leading up to the ruined abbey and St. Mary’s Church, where the salt wind had robbed the tombstones of their names. A group of young Goths, all black clothes, white faces and intricate silver jewelry, walked by the sheds where the fishermen unloaded their boats and sold their catch.

  From what Banks had read about them, and the music he had heard, they seemed obsessed with death and suicide, as well as with the undead and the “dark side” in general, but they were passive and pacifist and concerned with social matters, such as racism and war. Banks liked Joy Division, and he had heard them described as the archetypal Goth band. On balance, he thought, Goths were no weirder than the hippies had been, with their fascination with the occult, poetry and drug-induced enlightenment.

  The year 1969 was a period of great transition for Banks. After leaving school with a couple of decent A levels, he was living in a bedsit in Notting Hill and taking a course in business studies in London. He hadn’t felt much in common with his fellow students, though, so he had tended to fall in with a crowd from the art college, two of whom lived together in the same building as him, and they formed his real introduction, rather late in the day, to that strange blend of existentialism, communalism, hedonism and narcissism that was his take on late-sixties culture. They shared joints with him and Jem from across the hall, went to concerts and poetry readings, discussed squatters’ rights, Vietnam and Oz, and played “Alice’s Restaurant” over and over again.

  Banks had no idea what to do with his life. His parents had made it clear that they wanted him to have a crack at a white-collar career, rather than ending up in the brick factory, or the sheet-metal factory like his father, so business studies seemed like a logical step. And he did so much need to escape the stifling provinciality of Peterborough.

  He loved the music and had hitchhiked with his first real girlfriend, Kay Summerville, to the Blind Faith concert in Hyde Park the summer of that year, when he was still living at home in Peterborough, and to the Rolling Stones concert in memory of Brian Jones, at which Mick Jagger freed all the caged butterflies that hadn’t already died from the heat. He also remembered Dylan at the Isle of Wight, coming on late and singing “She Belongs to Me” and “To Ramona,” two of Banks’s favorites.

  But in Peterborough, he had been fairly isolated from the trendy fashions, causes and ideologies of the times, embarrassingly ignorant of what was really happening out there. For all the hyped-up change and revolution of the decade, it was a salutary lesson to bear in mind that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was kept from reaching number one by Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me,” and growing up in Peterborough, you could easily see why.

  That first college year, he remembered following with horror the saga of the Manson family, eventually arrested for the murders of Sharon Tate, Leno LaBianca and others. It had all passed into the history books now, of course, but then, as the story unfolded day by day in the newspapers and on television, and as the real horrors came to light, it had a powerful impact, not least because the Manson “family” seemed a bit like hippies and quoted the Beatles and revolutionary slogans. And then there were the girls, Manson’s “love slaves,” with strange names like Patricia Krenwinkel, Squeaky Fromme and Leslie Van Houten. The way they dressed and wore their hair they might have been living in Notting Hill. The famous photo of the bearded, staring Manson had given Banks almost as many nightmares as the one of Christine Keeler sitting naked on a chair had prompted wet dreams.

  Altamont had taken place in late 1969, too, he remembered, where someone was stabbed by a Hell’s Angel during the Stones’ performance. There were other things he vaguely remembered: the police charging a house in Piccadilly to evict squatters, rioting in Northern Ireland, stories of women and children murdered by American troops in My Lai, violent antiwar protests, four students shot by the National Guard at Kent State.

  Maybe it was hindsight, but things seemed to be taking a turn for the worse back then, falling apart, or perhaps that had been happening for a while, and he had only just noticed because he was there, in the thick of it. He probably wouldn’t have noticed the change in political climate if he’d stayed in Peterborough. Perhaps the business career would have worked out if he hadn’t got caught up in the tail end of the sixties in Notting Hill. As it was, by the end of his first year, he had lost all interest in cost accounting, industrial psychology and mercantile law.

  But he had no memory of hearing about the murder of a girl at a festival in Yorkshire. Back then, the provinces, especially in the north, were of little interest to those at the center of things, and local police forces worked far more independently of one another than they did today. He wondered if Enderby was right about Linda Lofthouse’s murder being the one Nick Barber had referred to. He had been so certain it was Robin Merchant, and he still wasn’t ruling that possibility out. But the news about Linda Lofthouse brought a whole new complexion to things, even if her murder had been solved. Was the killer still in jail? If not, could he somehow be involved in Nick Barber’s death? The more Banks thought about it, no matter what Catherine Gervaise said, the more he thought he was right, and that Barber had died for digging up the past, which that someone wanted to remain buried.

  Banks noticed a few clouds drift in from the east as he ate his haddock and chips, a
nd by the time he had finished it was starting to drizzle. He paid, left a small tip and headed for his car. Before he set off, he phoned Ken Blackstone in Leeds and asked him to find out what he could about Stanley Chadwick and the Linda Lofthouse investigation.

  Sunday, 21st September, 1969

  Steve answered the door late that Sunday afternoon, and when he saw Yvonne standing there, he turned away and walked down the hall. “I never thought I’d see you again,” he said. “You’ve got a bloody nerve showing up here.”

  Yvonne followed him into the living room. “But, Steve, it wasn’t my fault. It was McGarrity. He tried to force himself on me. He’s dangerous. You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Steve turned to face her. “So you went straight to Daddy.”

  “I was upset. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You never told me your father was a pig.”

  “You never asked. Besides, what does it matter?”

  “What does it matter? He violated our space. Him and the others. We got busted. That’s what matters. Now we’re going to have to go to court tomorrow morning. I’ll get a fine at least. And if my parents find out, I’m fucked. They’ll stop my allowance. That’s all down to you.”

  “But it wasn’t my fault, Steve. I’m sorry, really I am. I didn’t know they were going to bust you.” Yvonne moved toward him and reached out to touch him.

  He jerked away and sat down in the armchair. “Oh, come off it. You must have known damn well we’d be sitting around here smoking a few joints and listening to music. It’s not as if you haven’t done it with us often enough.”

  Yvonne knelt at his feet. “But I never sent them here. Honestly. I thought they would just arrest McGarrity, that’s all. You know I’d never do anything to get you in trouble.”

  “Then you’re more stupid than I thought you were. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t want you coming around here anymore. Whether you wanted to or not, you’ve brought nothing but trouble. Who knows who might follow you?”