Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  Annie picked up a folder from her desk, plucked her suede jacket from the hanger by the door, said she’d be back in a while, and walked down the stairs with a smile on her face.

  A cool wind gusted across the market square and the sky was quickly filling with dirty clouds, like ink spilled on a sheet of paper. Luckily, Annie didn’t have far to go, she thought, as she pulled the collar of her jacket around her throat and crossed the busy square. People leaned into the wind as they walked, hair flying, plastic bags from Somerfield’s and Boots fluttering as if they were filled with birds. The Darlington bus stood at its stop by the market cross, but nobody seemed to be getting on or off.

  Eastvale Computes had been open a couple of years now, and the owner, Barry Gilchrist, was the sort of chap who loved a technical challenge. As a consequence, people came in to chat about their computer problems, and Barry usually ended up solving them for free. Whether he ever sold any computers or not Annie had no idea, but she doubted it, with Aldi, and even Woolworth’s, offering much lower prices.

  Barry was one of those ageless young lads in glasses who looked like Harry Potter. Annie had been in the shop fairly often, and she was on friendly enough terms with him; she had even bought CD-ROMs and printer cartridges from him in an effort to give some support to local business. She got the impression that he rather fancied her because he got all tongue-tied when he spoke to her and found it hard to look her in the eye. It wasn’t offensive, though, like Templeton, and she was surprised to find that she felt more maternal toward him than anything else. She didn’t think she was old enough for that sort of thing, but supposed, when she thought about it, that she might, at a pinch, be old enough to be his mother if he was as young as he looked. It was a sobering thought.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, blushing as he looked up from a monitor behind the counter. “What can I do for you today?”

  “It’s official business,” Annie said, smiling. Judging by the expression that crossed his face and the way he surreptitiously hit a few keystrokes, Annie wondered if he’d been looking at Internet porn. She didn’t have him down as that type, but you never could tell, especially with computer geeks. “You might be able to help us,” she added.

  “Oh, I see.” He straightened his glasses. “Well, of course… er… whatever I can do. Computer problems at the station?”

  “Nothing like that. It’s Internet access I’m interested in.”

  “But, I thought…”

  “Not for me. A customer you might have had maybe a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Ah. Well, I don’t get very many, especially at this time of year. Tourists like it, of course, to check their e-mail, but most of the locals either have their own computers, or they’re just not interested.” Not to be interested, the way Barry Gilchrist said it, sounded infinitely sad.

  Annie took a photograph from the folder she had brought and handed it to him. “This man,” she said. “We know he was in Eastvale on Wednesday two weeks ago. We were just wondering if he came in here and asked to use your Internet access.”

  “Yes,” said Barry Gilchrist, turning a little pale. “I remember him. The journalist. That’s the man who was murdered, isn’t it? I saw it on the news.”

  “What day of the week did he come in?”

  “Not Wednesday. I think it was Friday morning.”

  The day he died, Annie thought. “Did he tell you he was a journalist or did you hear it?”

  “He told me. Said he needed a few minutes to do a spot of research, that there was no access where he was staying.”

  “How long was he on?”

  “Only about fifteen minutes. I didn’t even bother charging him.”

  “Now comes the tricky part,” said Annie. “I don’t suppose there’d still be any traces of where he went online?”

  Gilchrist shook his head. “I’m sorry, no. I mean, I said I don’t get a lot of customers this time of year, but I do get some, so I have to keep the histories and temporary Internet files clean.”

  “They say you can never quite get rid of everything on a computer. Do you think our technical unit could get anything if we took them in?”

  Gilchrist swallowed. “Took the computers away?”

  “Yes. I hardly have to remind you this is a murder investigation, do I?”

  “No. And I’m very sorry. He seemed like a nice enough bloke. Said he had wireless access on his laptop but there were no signals around these parts. I could sympathize with that. It took long enough to get broadband.”

  “So would they?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “If they took the computers apart, would they find anything?”

  “Oh, but they don’t need to do that,” he said.

  “Why’s that?” Annie asked.

  “Because I know the site he visited. One of them, at any rate. The first one.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I wasn’t spying or anything. I mean, there’s no privacy about it, anyway, as you can see. The computers are in a public area. Anyone could walk in and see what site someone was visiting.”

  “True,” said Annie. “So you’re saying he was making no efforts to hide his tracks. He didn’t erase the history himself, for example?”

  “He couldn’t do that. That power’s limited to the administrator, and that’s me. Providing access is one thing, but I don’t want people messing with the programs.”

  “Fair enough. So what was he doing?”

  “He was at the Mad Hatters web site. I could tell because it plays a little bit of that hit song of theirs when it starts up. What’s it called? ‘Love Got in the Way’?”

  Annie knew the song. It had been a huge hit about eight years ago. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes. I had to go around the front to check the printer cartridge stock, and I could see it over his shoulder – photos of the band, biographies, discographies, that sort of thing.”

  Annie knew Banks would be as disappointed as she was with this. What could be more natural for a music journalist writing about the Mad Hatters than to visit their web site? “Was that all?”

  “I think so. I mean, I heard the music when he first started, and he finished a short while after I’d checked the stock. He could have followed any number of links in between, but if he did, he went back to the main site again.” Gilchrist pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger. “Does that help?”

  Annie smiled at him. “Every little bit helps,” she said.

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, he was carrying a paperback book with him, as if he’d been sitting and having a read in a café or something. I saw him writing something in the back of it with a pencil. I couldn’t see what it was.”

  “Interesting,” said Annie, remembering the Ian McEwan book Banks had found at Moorview Cottage. He had said something about some penciled numbers in the back. Maybe she should have a look. She thanked Gilchrist for his time and headed out into the wind.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Because of roadworks and poor weather on the M1, it took Banks almost three hours to drive to Tania Hutchison’s house on Friday morning, and when he got to Tania’s village he was so thoroughly pissed off with driving that the beautiful rolling country of the English heartland was lost on him.

  He had spent the latter part of Thursday afternoon, and a good part of the evening, reading over the files on the Linda Lofthouse investigation and the Patrick McGarrity trial transcripts, all to little avail, so he had not been in the best of moods when he got up that morning. Brian was still in bed, but Emilia had been puttering around the place with a smile on her face and had made him a pot of coffee and some delicious scrambled eggs. He was getting used to having her around.

  Tania’s house, perched on the edge of a tiny village, wasn’t especially large, but it was built of golden Cotswold stone, with a thatched roof, and it must have cost her a pretty penny. The thing that surprised Banks most
was that he could drive right up to her front gate; there was no security, no high wall or fence, merely a privet hedge. He had rung earlier to let her know he was coming, to get directions, and to make sure she would be in, but he had told her nothing about the reason for his visit.

  Tania greeted him at the door, and though there was no one else present, Banks knew he would have been able to pick her out of a crowd easily. It wasn’t that she looked like a rock star or anything, whatever a rock star looked like. She was more petite than he had imagined from seeing her onstage and on television, and she certainly looked older now, but it wasn’t so much the familiarity of her looks as a certain class, a presence. Charisma, Banks supposed. It wasn’t something he came across often in his line of work. For a moment, Banks felt absurdly embarrassed, remembering the teenage crush he had had on her. He wondered if she could tell from his behavior.

  Her clothes were of the casual-expensive kind, understated designer jeans and a loose cable-knit sweater; she was barefoot, toenails painted red, and her dark hair, in the past so long and glossy, was now cut short and laced with delicate threads of gray. There were lines around her eyes and mouth, but otherwise her complexion seemed flawless and smooth. She wore little makeup, just enough to accentuate her full lips and her watchful green eyes, and she moved with a certain natural grace as Banks followed her through a broad arched hallway into a large living room, where a lacquered grand piano stood by the French windows, and the floor was covered with a lush Persian carpet.

  The other thing Banks noticed was a heavy glass ashtray, and Tania wasted no time in lighting a cigarette once she had curled up in an armchair and gestured for Banks to sit opposite her. She held the long, tipped cigarette in the V of her index and second fingers and took short, frequent drags. He felt like smoking with her, but he suppressed the urge. There was a fragility and a wariness about her, as well as class and charisma, as if she’d been hurt or betrayed so many times that once more would cause her world to crumble. Her name had been romantically linked with a number of famous rock stars and actors over the years, and with equally famous breakups, but now, Banks had read recently, she lived alone with her two cats, and she liked it that way. The cats, one marmalade and one tabby, were in evidence, but neither showed much interest in Banks.

  As he made himself comfortable, Banks had to remind himself that Tania was a suspect, and he had to put out of his mind the vivid sexual fantasies he had once entertained about her and stop acting like a tongue-tied adolescent. She had been at Brimleigh with Linda Lofthouse and had later been a member of the Mad Hatters. She had also been present at Swainsview Lodge on the night Robin Merchant drowned. She had no motive for either crime, as far as Banks knew, but motives sometimes had a habit of emerging later, once the means and the opportunity were firmly nailed in place.

  “You weren’t very forthcoming over the telephone, you know,” she said, a touch of reproach in her husky voice. Banks could still hear hints of a North American accent, though he knew she had been in England since her student days.

  “It’s about Nick Barber’s murder,” he said, watching for a reaction.

  “Nick Barber? The writer? Good Lord. I hadn’t heard.” She turned pale.

  “What is it?”

  “I spoke to him just a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to talk to me. He was doing a piece on the Mad Hatters.”

  “Did you agree to talk to him?”

  “Yes. Nick was one of the few music journos you could trust not to distort everything. Oh, Christ, this is terrible.” She put her hand to her mouth. If she was acting, Banks thought, then she was damned good. But she was a performer by trade, he reminded himself. As if sensing her grief, one of the cats made its way over slowly and, with a scowl at Banks, leaped onto her lap. She stroked it absently and it purred.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were close, or I would have broken the news a bit more tactfully. I assumed you knew.”

  “We weren’t close,” she said. “I just knew him in passing, that’s all. I’ve met him once or twice. And I liked his work. It’s a hell of a shock. He was planning to come by and talk to me about my early days with the band.”

  “When was this?” Banks asked.

  “We didn’t have a firm date. He phoned two, maybe three weeks ago and said he’d get in touch with me again soon. He never did.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No. He said he was ringing from a public telephone, and his phone card ran out. What happened? Why would anyone murder Nick Barber?”

  That explained why they hadn’t seen Tania’s number on Barber’s mobile or landline phone records, Banks thought. “I think it might be something to do with the story he was working on,” he said.

  “The story? But how could it be?”

  “I don’t know yet, but we haven’t been able to find any other lines of inquiry.” Banks told her a little about Barber’s movements in Yorkshire, in particular his unsatisfactory meeting with Vic Greaves.

  “Poor Vic,” she said. “How is he?”

  Banks didn’t know how to answer that. He’d thought Greaves was clearly off his rocker, if not clinically insane, but he seemed to function well enough, with a little help from Chris Adams, and he was certainly high on Banks’s list of suspects. “Same as usual, I suppose,” he said, though he didn’t know what was usual for Vic Greaves.

  “Vic was one of the sensitive ones,” Tania said, “much too fragile for the life he led and the risks he took.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tania stubbed out her cigarette before answering. “There are people in the business whose minds and bodies can take an awful lot of substance abuse – Iggy Pop and Keith Richards come to mind, for example – and there are those who go on the ride with them and fall off. Vic was one who fell off.”

  “Because he was sensitive?”

  She nodded. “Some people could eat acid as if it were candy and have nothing but a good time, like watching their favorite cartoons over and over again. Others saw the devil, the jaws of hell or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the horrors beyond the grave. Vic was one of the latter. He had Hammer-horror trips, and the visions unhinged him.”

  “So LSD caused his breakdown?”

  “It certainly contributed to it. But I’m not saying something wouldn’t have happened anyway. Certainly the emotions and some of the images were in his mind already. Acid merely released them. But maybe he should have kept the cork in the bottle.”

  “Why did he keep taking it?”

  Tania shrugged. “There’s really no answer to that. Acid certainly isn’t addictive in the way heroin and coke are. Not all his trips were bad. I think maybe he was trying to get through hell to something better. Maybe he thought if he kept on trying, then one day he would find the peace he was looking for.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “You’ve seen him yourself. You should know.”

  “Who was he riding with?”

  “There wasn’t any one particular person. It was meant as a sort of metaphor for the whole scene back then. The doors of perception and all that. Vic was a poet and he loved and wanted all that mystical, decadent glamour. He admired Jim Morrison a lot, even met him at the Isle of Wight.” She smiled to herself. “Apparently, it didn’t go well. The Lizard King was in a bad mood, and he didn’t want to know poor Vic, let alone read his poetry. Told him to fuck off. That hurt.”

  “Too bad,” said Banks. “What about the rest of the band’s drug intake?”

  “None of them was as sensitive as Vic, and none of them did as much acid.”

  “Robin Merchant?”

  “Hardly. I’d have put him down as one of the survivors if it hadn’t been for the accident.”

  “What about Chris Adams?”

  “Chris?” A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “Chris was probably the straightest of the lot. Still is.”

  “Why do you think he takes such good care of Vic Greaves? Guilt?�
�

  “Over what?”

  “I don’t know,” Banks said. “Responsibility for the breakdown, something like that?”

  “No,” Tania said, shaking her head vigorously. “Far from it. Chris was always trying to get Vic off acid, helping him through bad trips.”

  “Then why?”

  Tania paused. It was quiet outside, and Banks couldn’t even hear any birds singing. “If you ask me,” she said, “I’d say it was because he loved him. Not in any homosexual sense, you understand – Chris isn’t like that, or Vic, for that matter – but as a brother. Don’t forget, they grew up together, knew each other as kids on a working-class estate. They shared dreams. If Chris had had any musical talent, he’d have been in the band, but he was the first to admit he couldn’t even manage the basic three rock chords, and he certainly couldn’t carry even the simplest melody. But he did turn out to have good business sense and vision, and that’s what shaped the band after all the tragedies. It was all very well to tune in, turn on, drop out and say, Whatever, man, but someone had to handle the day-to-day mechanics of making a living, and if someone trustworthy like Chris didn’t do it, you could bet your life that there were any number of unscrupulous bastards waiting in the wings ready to exploit someone else’s talent.”

  “Interesting,” said Banks. “So in some ways Chris Adams was the driving force behind the Mad Hatters?”

  “He held things together, yes. And he helped us with a new direction when both Robin and Vic were gone.”

  “Was it Chris who invited you to join the band?”

  Tania twisted a silver ring on her finger. “Yes. It’s no secret. We were going out together at the time. I met him at Brimleigh. I’d seen him a couple of times before, when my friend Linda got me into Mad Hatters events, but we hadn’t really talked like we did at Brimleigh. I had a boyfriend then, a student in Paris, but we soon drifted apart, and Chris was in London a lot. He’d phone me and finally I agreed to have dinner with him.”