Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  Childhood. Now Banks remembered the little frisson of possibility he had experienced when Simon Bradley had talked about Linda Lofthouse’s unwanted pregnancy.

  It shouldn’t be too hard to find out whether he was right, he decided, picking up the phone and looking up the Barbers’ number in the case file.

  When he got Louise Barber on the phone, Banks told her who he was and said, “I know this is probably an odd question, and it’s not meant to be in any way disturbing or upsetting, but was Nick adopted?”

  There was a short pause, followed by a sob. “Yes,” she said. “We adopted him when he was only days old. We raised him as if he were our own and that’s how we always think of him.”

  “I’m sure you did,” said Banks. “Believe me, there’s no hint of criticism here. I wouldn’t expect it to enter your head at such a time, and from all I’ve found out, Nick led a healthy and happy life with many advantages he probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s just that… well, did he know? Did you tell him?”

  “Yes,” said Louise Barber. “We told him a long time ago, as soon as we thought he would be able to absorb it.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “Then? Nothing. He said that as far as he was concerned, we were his parents and that was all there was to it.”

  “Did he ever get curious about his birth mother?”

  “It’s funny, but he did, yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “About five or six years ago.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “He told us he didn’t want us to think there was a problem, or that it was anything to do with us, but a friend of his who was also adopted told him it was important to find out. He said something about it making him whole, complete.”

  “Did he find her?”

  “He didn’t really talk to us about it much after that. You have to understand, we found it all a bit upsetting, and Nicholas was careful not to hurt us. He told us he found out who she was, but we have no idea if he traced her or met her.”

  “Do you remember her name? Did he tell you that?”

  “Yes. Linda Lofthouse. But that’s all I know. We asked him not to talk to us about her again.”

  “The name is enough,” said Banks. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Barber, and I do apologize for bringing up difficult memories.”

  “I suppose it can’t be helped. Surely this can’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Nicholas?”

  “We don’t know. Right now, it’s just another piece of information to add to the puzzle. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Banks hung up and thought. So Nick Barber was Linda Lofthouse’s son. He must have found out that his mother had been murdered only a couple of years after he was born, and that she was Vic Greaves’s cousin, which no doubt fueled his interest in the Mad Hatters, already present to some extent because of his interest in the music of the period.

  But the knowledge raised a number of new questions for Banks. Had Barber accepted the standard version of her murder? Did he believe that Patrick McGarrity had killed his mother? Or had he found out something else? If he had stumbled across something that indicated McGarrity was innocent, or had not acted alone, then he might easily have blundered into a situation without knowing how dangerous it was. But it all depended on whether or not Chadwick had been right about McGarrity. It was time to head for Leeds and have a chat with Ken Blackstone.

  Banks made it to Leeds in little over an hour, coming off New York Road at Eastgate and heading for Millgarth, the Leeds Police Headquarters at about half past three on Thursday afternoon. Like many things, he supposed, this business could have been conducted over the telephone, but he preferred personal contact, if possible. Somehow, little nuances and vague impressions didn’t quite make it over the phone lines.

  Ken Blackstone was waiting in his office, a tiny space partitioned at the end of a room full of busy detectives, nattily dressed as ever in his best Next pinstripe, dazzling white shirt and maroon-and-gray-striped tie, held in place by a silver pin in the shape of a fountain pen. With his wispy gray hair curling over his ears and his gold-framed reading glasses, he looked more like a university professor than a police officer. He and Banks had known one another for years, and Banks thought Ken was the closest he had to a friend, next to Dirty Dick Burgess, but Burgess was in London.

  “First off,” said Blackstone, “I thought you might like to see this.” He slid a photograph across his desk and Banks turned it to face him. It showed the head and shoulders of a man in his early forties, perhaps, neat black hair plastered flat with Brylcreem, hard, angled face, straight nose and square jaw with a slight dimple. But it was the eyes that caught Banks’s attention the most. They gave nothing away except, perhaps, for a slight hint of dark shadows in their depths. If eyes were supposed to be the windows to the soul, these were the blackout curtains. This was a hard, haunted, uncompromising man, Banks thought. And a moral one. He didn’t know why, and realized he was being a bit fanciful, but he sensed a hint of hard religion in the man’s background. Hardly surprising, as there had been plenty of that around in both Scotland and Yorkshire over the years. “Interesting,” Banks said, passing it back. “Stanley Chadwick, I assume?”

  Blackstone nodded. “Taken on his promotion to detective inspector in October 1965.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, it’s a bit noisy and stuffy in here. Fancy heading out for a coffee?”

  “I’m all coffeed out,” said Banks, “but maybe we can have a late lunch? I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  “Fine with me. I’m not hungry, but I’ll join you.”

  They left Millgarth and walked on to Eastgate. It had turned into a fine day, with that mix of cloud and sun you got so often in Yorkshire when it wasn’t raining, and just chilly enough for a raincoat or light overcoat.

  “Did you manage to find out anything?” Banks asked.

  “I’ve done a bit of digging,” said Blackstone, “and it looks like pretty solid investigating on the surface of it.”

  “Only on the surface?”

  “I haven’t dug that deeply yet. And remember, it was essentially a North Yorkshire case, so most of the paperwork’s up there.”

  “I’ve seen it,” he said. “I was just wondering about the West Yorkshire angle, and about Chadwick himself.”

  “DI Chadwick was on loan to the North Yorkshire Constabulary. From what I can glean, he’d had a few successes here since his promotion and was a bit of a golden boy at the time.”

  “I heard he was tough, and he certainly looks that way.”

  “I never knew him personally, but I managed to turn up a couple of retired officers who did. He was a hard man, by all accounts, but fair and honest, and he got results. He had a strong Scottish Presbyterian background, but one of his old colleagues told me he thought he’d lost his faith during the war. Hardly bloody surprising when you consider the poor sod saw action in Burma and was part of the D-day invasion.”

  “Where is he now?”

  They waited until the lights changed, then crossed Vicar Lane. “Dead,” Blackstone said finally. “According to our personnel records, Stanley Chadwick died in March 1973.”

  “So young?” said Banks. “That must have been a hell of a shock for all concerned. He would only have been in his early fifties.”

  “Apparently, his health had been in decline for a couple of years,” Blackstone said. “He’d had a lot of sick time, and performancewise there were rumors that he was dragging his feet. He retired due to ill health in late 1972.”

  “That seems a rather sudden decline,” Banks said. “Any speculation as to what it was?”

  “Well, it wasn’t murder, if that’s what you’re thinking. He had a history of heart problems, hereditary, apparently, which had gone untreated, perhaps even unnoticed, for years. He died in his sleep of a heart attack. But you have to remember, this is just from the files and the memory of a couple of old men I managed to track do
wn. And some of the old information is impossible to locate. We moved here from Brotherton House in 1976, which was well before my time, and inevitably stuff went missing in the move, so your guess is as good as mine as to the rest.”

  Simon Bradley had told Banks he’d heard Chadwick wasn’t in good health, but Banks hadn’t realized things were that bad. Could there have been anything suspicious about his death? First Linda Lofthouse, then Robin Merchant, then Stanley Chadwick? Banks couldn’t imagine what linked them to one another. Chadwick had investigated the Lofthouse case, but had had nothing to do with Merchant’s drowning. He had, however, met the Mad Hatters at Swainsview Lodge, and Vic Greaves was Linda Lofthouse’s cousin. There had to be something he was missing. Maybe Chadwick’s daughter, Yvonne, would help, if he could find her.

  They turned down Briggate, a pedestrian precinct. There were plenty of shoppers in evidence, many of them young people, teenage girls pushing prams, the boys with them looking too young and inexperienced to be fathers. Many of the girls looked too young to be mothers, too, but Banks knew damn well they weren’t merely helping out their big sisters. Teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were at appallingly high rates.

  Because he still had Linda Lofthouse and Nick Barber on his mind, Banks thought back to the sixties, to what the media had dubbed the “sexual revolution.” True, the pill had made it possible for women to have sex without fear of pregnancy, but it had also left them with little or no excuse not to have sex. In the name of liberation, women were expected to sleep around; they had the freedom to do so, the reasoning went, so they should, and there was subtle and not so subtle cultural and peer pressure on them to do so. After all, the worst anyone could get was crabs or a dose of clap, so sex was relatively fear-free.

  But there were plenty of unwanted pregnancies back then, too, Banks remembered, as not all girls were on the pill, or willing to have abortions, certainly in the provinces. Linda Lofthouse had been one of them, and Norma Coulton, just down the street from where Banks lived, was another. Banks remembered the gossip and the dirty looks she got when she walked into the newsagent’s. He wondered what had happened to her and her child. At least he knew what had happened to Linda Lofthouse’s son; he had met the same fate as his mother.

  “Any idea what happened to Chadwick’s family?” he asked.

  “According to what I could find out, he had a wife called Janet and a daughter called Yvonne. Both survived him, but nobody’s kept tabs on them. I don’t suppose it would be too difficult to track them down. Pensions or Human Resources might be able to help.”

  “Do what you can,” said Banks. “I appreciate it. And I’ll put Winsome on it at our end. She’s good at that sort of thing. The daughter may have married, changed her name, of course, but we’ll give it a try: electoral rolls, DVLA, PNC and the rest. Who knows, we might get lucky before we have to resort to more time consuming methods.”

  They passed a thin bearded young man selling the Big Issue at the entrance to Thornton’s Arcade. Blackstone bought a copy, folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket. Two young policemen passed them, both wearing black helmets and bulletproof vests and carrying Heckler amp; Koch carbines.

  “It’s a fact of the times here, I’m afraid,” said Blackstone.

  Banks nodded. What bothered him most was that the officers looked only about fifteen.

  “Sorry I’m not being a lot of help,” Blackstone went on.

  “Nonsense,” said Banks. “You’re helping me fill in the picture, and that’s all I need right now. I know I’ll have to read the files and the trial transcripts soon, but I keep putting it off because those things bore me so much.”

  “You can do that in my office after we’ve had a bite to eat. I have to go out. I know what you mean, though. I’d rather curl up with a good Flash-man or Sharpe, myself.” Blackstone stopped at the end of an alley. “Let’s try the Ship this time. Whitelocks is always too damned crowded these days, and they’ve changed the menu. It’s getting too trendy. And somehow I don’t see you sitting out in the Victoria Quarter at the Harvey Nichols café eating a garlic-and-Brie frittata.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Banks. “You’d be surprised. I scrub up quite nicely, and I don’t mind a bit of foreign grub every now and then. But the Ship sounds fine.”

  They ordered pints of Tetley’s, and Banks chose the giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausages and gravy and sat down in the dim brass and dark wood interior. Blackstone stuck with his beer.

  Banks told Blackstone about their troublesome new superintendent and the fact that Templeton might be bringing in just too many apples for the teacher. Then he chatted about Brian and his new girlfriend Emilia turning up till their food came and they got back to Stanley Chadwick and Linda Lofthouse.

  “Do you think I’m tilting at windmills, Ken?” Banks asked.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, but I don’t have enough to go on to advise you on that score. Usually your windmills turn out to be all too human. Explain your reasoning.”

  Banks sipped some beer, trying to put his thoughts in order. It was a useful, if difficult, exercise. “There isn’t much, really,” he said. “Superintendent Gervaise thinks the past is over and the guilty have been punished, but I’m not so sure. It’s not that I think Vic Greaves is a killer because he has mental problems. Christ, it might even be Chris Adams, for all I know. He doesn’t live that far away. Or even Tania Hutchison. It’s not as if Oxfordshire’s on the moon, either. I just think that if Nick Barber was as good and as thorough a music journalist as everyone says he was, then he might have struck a nerve, and Vic Greaves is one of the few people he had tried to speak to about the story before his murder. I’ve also just discovered that Nick was Linda Lofthouse’s son, adopted at birth by the Barbers, and that he found out who his birth mother was about five years ago. Barber was a journalist, and I think he simply tried to find out as much about her and her times as he could because he was already interested in the music and the period. One thing he found out was that Vic Greaves was her cousin. Greaves also lives only walking distance away from Barber’s rented cottage, and someone saw a figure running around at the time of the murder. The only things I can find in the past that cast any sort of suspicions on Greaves and the others are the murder of Linda Lofthouse, because she was backstage at the Brimleigh Festival with Tania Hutchison, and she was Greaves’s cousin, and the drowning of the Mad Hatters’ bassist, Robin Merchant, when Greaves, Adams and Tania Hutchison were all present at Swainsview Lodge. And they’re both closed cases.”

  “Linda Lofthouse’s murderer was caught, and Merchant’s drowning was ruled death by misadventure, right?”

  “Right. And Linda’s killer was stabbed in jail, so it’s not as if we can ask him to clear anything up for us. Sounds as if he was deranged in the first place.”

  “But ruling out the angry husband or passing tramp theory, that’s the default line of inquiry?”

  “Pretty much so. Chris Adams said Barber had a coke habit, but we can’t find any evidence of that. If he did, it obviously wasn’t big-time.”

  “Have you got Barber’s phone records yet?”

  “We’re working on it, but we don’t expect too much there.”

  “Why not?”

  “There was no landline at the cottage where he was staying, and he was out of mobile range. If he needed to phone anyone he’d have had to use the public telephone box, either in Fordham or in Eastvale.”

  “What about Internet access? You’d think a savvy music journalist would be all wired up for that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not if he didn’t have a phone line, or even wireless access. Blackberry or Bluetooth, or whatever it is.”

  “Aren’t there any Internet cafés in Eastvale?”

  Banks glanced at Blackstone, ate another mouthful of sausage and washed it down with a swig of beer. “Good point, Ken. Apart from the library, which is as slow as a horse and cart, there’s a computer sho
p in the market square, Eastvale Computes, and I suppose we could check there. Problem is, the owner’s only got two computers available to the public, and I should imagine the histories get wiped pretty often. If Nick Barber used either of them, it’d have been a couple of weeks ago, and all traces would be gone by now. It’s still worth a try, though.”

  “So what next?”

  “Well,” said Banks, “there are a few more people to talk to, starting with Tania Hutchison and Chadwick’s daughter, Yvonne, when we find her, but for the moment, I’ve got a CD collection with a lot of holes in it, and Borders is beckoning just up Briggate.”

  Annie got Banks’s phone call from Blackstone’s office in Leeds late that afternoon and welcomed the break from the dull routine of statement reading. Kelly Soames was still holding her own and would most likely be discharged the following day. They still hadn’t found her father.

  Before Annie left the squad room, Winsome came up trumps with Nick Barber’s mobile service, but the results were disappointing. He had made no calls since arriving at the cottage because he had no coverage there. He could, of course, have used his mobile in Eastvale, but according to the records he hadn’t. If he had been up to anything at all, he had kept it very much to himself. That wouldn’t be surprising, Annie thought. She had known a few journalists in her time, and had found that they were a secretive lot, on the whole; they had to be, as theirs was very much a first-come, first-served kind of business.

  Templeton had just got back from Fordham, and Annie noticed him watching closely as she leaned over Winsome’s shoulder to read the notes. She whispered in Winsome’s ear, then let her hand rest casually on her shoulder. She could see the prurient curiosity in Templeton’s gaze now. Enough rope, she thought. And if he knew that she had stayed at Winsome’s the other night, who could guess what wild tales he might take to Superintendent Gervaise? After her talk with Banks, Annie’s anger had diminished, though she still blamed Templeton for what had happened. She knew there was no point confronting him; he just wouldn’t get it. Banks was right. Let him crucify himself; he was already well on his way.