Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  “I hope you’re right,” said Annie.

  So did Banks as he started the Porsche and negotiated his way out of East-vale toward Lyndgarth. He recalled the fear he had felt searching Greaves’s cottage and it made his mouth dry. People as disturbed as Vic Greaves could sometimes summon up amazing, almost superhuman, strength. At least Banks had told Annie and Winsome where he was going before he set off and asked them to give him a twenty-minute start before they sent in a patrol car as backup. He couldn’t be certain that Greaves was where he thought he was, he realized as he crossed the bridge over the Swain and headed for Lyndgarth, but he had a damned good idea.

  The estate agent had told him that someone had been seen in the vicinity of Swainsview Lodge, and Greaves had turned uncommunicative at the mention of the place. It must have had very strong associations for him from a particular period of his life, and it would be natural enough for him to gravitate there in times of stress or confusion. Or so Banks hoped as he parked on the bleak daleside and the wind whipped at his face when he opened the car door.

  The door through which he had previously entered was securely locked, and Banks was certain nobody could get in that way. An unpaved lane ran down the hill by the side of the lodge to the riverside hamlet of Brayke, and at the top of the lane was a side entrance leading to two large garages, both also locked. A fairly high drystone wall ran down the hill parallel to the lane, but it would be easy enough for anyone to climb, Banks thought, especially in one section which had lost a few stones. You might not be able to get into the house without breaking a window, he realized, but anyone could gain access to the grounds.

  Banks’s first clue was a bicycle partially hidden in the ditch and covered with a blue plastic sheet held down by two stones, flapping in the wind. Clearly Greaves couldn’t get himself and his bicycle over the wall, too.

  Convinced that he was right now, Banks hopped the wall and found himself in the garden beyond the swimming pool, where the vast neglected lawn started its long slope down to the river. He moved up to the edge of the pool, the familiar dark cracked stone covered with moss and lichens, and the pool itself choked with weeds, littered with broken glass and empty Carlsberg tins.

  He called out Vic Greaves’s name, but the wind blew it back. There were shadows everywhere and Banks found himself jumping at each one, a heavy knot at the center of his chest. He was in the open, he realized, and wished he could be more certain of his assessment that Vic Greaves was harmless.

  An empty Coke tin came skittering out of the grass onto the patio and Banks turned, tense, ready to defend himself.

  When he reached the side of the pool closest to the house, he thought he could see something sticking out from behind one of the pillars under the upper terrace, close to where the French windows from the studio opened into the courtyard. The area was in the shadows, so it was hard to be sure, but he thought it was the lower half of a leg, with the trousers tucked into the boot. When he got closer, he saw it was actually a bicycle clip.

  “Hello, Vic,” he said. “Aren’t you going to come out?”

  After what seemed like a long time, the leg moved and Vic Greaves’s shiny bald head appeared from behind the pillar.

  “You remember me, don’t you, Vic?” Banks said. “There’s no need to be afraid. I came to see you at the cottage.”

  Still Vic didn’t respond or move. He just kept looking at Banks.

  “Come on out, Vic,” Banks said. “I just want to ask you a few questions, that’s all.”

  “Vic’s not here,” the small voice said finally.

  “Yes, he is,” said Banks.

  Vic held his ground. Banks circled a little, so he could at least get a better view. “All right,” he said. “If you want to stay there, stay. I’ll talk to you from here, okay?”

  The wind was howling in the recess made by the overhanging terrace, but Banks could just about make out Greaves’s agreement. He was sitting with his back to the wall, hunched over, arms hugging his knees to his chest.

  “I’ll do the talking,” said Banks, “and you can tell me whether I’m right or wrong. Okay?”

  Greaves studied him with serious, narrowed eyes and said nothing.

  “It goes back a long time,” Banks began. “To 1969, when the Mad Hatters played the Brimleigh Festival. There was a girl backstage called Linda Lofthouse. Your cousin. She got a backstage pass because of you. She was with her best friend, Tania Hutchison, who became a member of the band about a year later. But that’s getting ahead. Are you with me so far?”

  Greaves still didn’t say anything, but Banks could swear he detected a flicker of interest in his expression.

  “Cut forward to late on that last night of the festival. Led Zeppelin were playing and Linda needed a little space to clear her head, so she went for a walk in the woods. Someone followed her. Was that you, Vic?”

  Greaves shook his head.

  “Are you sure?” Banks persisted. “Maybe you were tripping, maybe you didn’t know what you were doing, but something happened, didn’t it? Something changed that night, something snapped in you, and you killed her. Perhaps you didn’t realize what you’d done, perhaps it was like looking down on someone else doing it, but you did it, didn’t you, Vic?”

  Finally, Greaves found his voice. “No,” he said. “No, he’s wrong. Vic’s a good boy.” His words were almost blown into silence by the wind.

  “Tell me how I’m wrong, Vic,” Banks went on. “Tell me what I’m wrong about. I want to know.”

  “Can’t,” said Greaves. “Can’t tell.”

  “Yes, you can. Am I wrong about how it happened? What about Cardiff? What about Brighton? And Plymouth? Were there any others?”

  Greaves just shook his head from side to side, muttering something Banks couldn’t hear for the wind.

  “I’m trying to help you,” said Banks, “but I can’t help if you don’t tell me the truth.”

  “There is no truth,” said Greaves.

  “There must be. Who killed those girls? Who killed Nick Barber? Did he find out? Is that why? Did he confront you with the evidence?”

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?” said a deep voice behind Banks. “You can tell he doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  Banks turned and saw Chris Adams standing by the pool, ponytail blowing in the wind, bulbous face red, potbelly sagging over his jeans. Banks walked over to him. “I think he does,” he said. “But seeing as you’re here, why don’t you tell me? I think you know as much about it as he does.”

  “It was all over and done with years ago,” said Adams.

  “You may wish it was, but it isn’t. That’s what Nick Barber found out about, isn’t it? So Vic here killed him.”

  “No, that’s not what happened.”

  “What about the girl in Cardiff? The one in Plymouth? What about them?”

  Adams paled. “You know?”

  “It wasn’t that hard once we started following in Nick Barber’s footsteps. He was thorough, and even his killer didn’t manage to obliterate everything he’d found out. Why have you been protecting Vic Greaves all these years?”

  “Look at him, Mr. Banks,” said Adams. “What would you do? He’s my oldest friend. We grew up together, for crying out loud. He’s like a baby.”

  “He’s a killer. That means he could kill again. You weren’t able to supervise him twenty-four hours a day. I imagine you only came down here because I phoned you and told you things were coming to a head, that I was close to finding out who killed Nick Barber. You guessed where Vic was. He’s been here before, hasn’t he? And told you about it, too, I’ll bet.”

  “The place does seem to attract him,” said Adams calmly. “But you’re wrong about the rest. Vic’s no killer.”

  At first Banks thought Adams was blowing smoke, but something snagged at his mind, a little thing, and it pulled until it brought a number of other little things tumbling into the open with it. As the wind howled around his head, Banks found himself r
earranging the pieces inside and putting them together in a different pattern, one he could have kicked himself for not seeing sooner. He still wasn’t sure about everything yet, but it was all starting to add up. Was Greaves left-handed? He tried to remember from their meeting which hand Greaves had been stirring the stew with, but he couldn’t.

  He was certain of one thing, though: when he was watching the Mad Hatters DVD the previous evening with Brian, he had noticed that Robin Merchant played his bass left-handed, like Paul McCartney. He had simply registered it unconsciously at the time, not really made anything of it, or tried to link it to the case. But now, as he thought about it, he realized that the last killing they knew of was on the nineteenth of May, about a month before Robin Merchant’s drowning. Unless there were other, later, incidents that Barber hadn’t uncovered, the timing worked. He glanced at his watch. He had been at Swainsview Lodge for only ten minutes.

  “Robin Merchant,” he said.

  “Bravo,” said Adams. “Robin Merchant was one sick puppy, as they say. Oh, he was glib and charming enough on the surface, but beyond that it was a case of Jekyll and Hyde. His mind was polluted by all that Aleister Crowley stuff he immersed himself in. Have you heard about Crowley?”

  “I know the name,” said Banks.

  “He was a drug addict and a womanizer, the self-proclaimed ‘wickedest man in the world.’ The Great Beast. His motto was, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Robin Merchant took him quite literally. Do you know Robin even tried to justify his ‘sacrifices,’ as he called them to me? He had no conscience, even before he got involved in drugs and black magic and all that shit. It just made him worse, made him think he was more godlike – or more devil-like, I should say. But he hid it so well. He got obsessed with those Los Angeles murders, too, the ritualistic elements. He thought he saw some sort of occult significance in them. I don’t know if you remember, but they finally caught Manson that October, and Robin started to identify with him and his power trip. He saw himself as some sort of messenger of darkness. He didn’t murder rich piggies, though. He murdered beauty and purity. The flower was his signature.”

  “What happened?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because you know I’ll find out.”

  Adams sighed and stared across the pool as if he were staring across forty years of bad history. He reached in his pockets for a cigarette, dipped his head and cupped his hand to light it against the wind. “I saw him,” he said finally. “The fifth time, in Winchester. You don’t know about that one, do you?”

  “No,” said Banks.

  “That’s because I saved her life.” Adams spoke without any hint of vanity or self-satisfaction, as if he were stating a mere fact. “I had my suspicions about Robin, and I was about the only one who ever bothered to read the newspapers back then. I saw our reviews, and I read the stories about those girls. At first I thought nothing of it. It’s hard to really believe that the person sitting next to you on the tour bus is a killer. But I should have known. It all kept adding up. Things he said, the way he talked about people. Then I remembered Brimleigh. The first. I still couldn’t be certain it was Robin, couldn’t accept it, I suppose, but I didn’t know where he was at the time.

  “Anyway, at Winchester – this would be June, just a week or so before his death – I followed him after the show. There was a girl taking a shortcut through a cemetery, of all places, the fool, and that’s where he pounced. I was just behind him. I shouted something. It was dark, and I don’t know if he recognized me, but he growled at me like some sort of wild animal, then he belted off like nobody’s business. The girl was all right. I made sure she got home okay without letting on who I was. I don’t know if she reported the incident or not, but I heard nothing more of it. Now the problem became what to do about Robin. I talked to him. He didn’t deny it. That’s when he gave me all that Aleister Crowley and Charles Manson crap, trying to justify himself and his actions. I couldn’t let him go on killing people, but at the same time… a trial, conviction… It was unthinkable. I mean, back then, a rock band could get away with most things, but murder… especially that kind of murder. We’d have been tarnished forever, especially in the wake of the Manson family trial. We’d never have survived. The band would never have survived. Vic. I couldn’t allow that to happen to the others after all the hard years they’d put in. Fortunately, the problem took care of itself.”

  “No,” said Banks. “You killed Robin Merchant. You weren’t in bed with Tania Hutchison that night. You went to confront him, here, by the pool. I’m not sure whether you intended to kill him, but you saw something unstoppable in him, and you felt you had no other choice. It worked perfectly. So easy.” He glanced over to the terrace. Vic Greaves was still there, apparently listening. “But someone saw you, didn’t he, Chris? Vic saw you.” Fifteen minutes had now passed since Banks arrived.

  “I’m not admitting to killing anybody,” said Adams. “You think what you like. You can’t prove a thing.”

  “And you killed Nick Barber,” Banks went on. “It was your silver Mercedes the tourist couple and the girl in the youth hostel saw that night. The running figure was just a jogger. It was foolish of me to think that Vic could have done anything like that himself. Everyone was right about him. He might be a bit off in the head, but he’s a gentle soul at heart. Vic was upset, and he told you in that roundabout way of his that a music journalist had come around pestering him with questions about the past, about Brimleigh, Linda Lofthouse and the other murders. Cardiff. Brighton. Plymouth. Questions to which only you and Vic knew the answers. The journalist said he was going to come back. He’d left his card. You didn’t think Vic could take the strain of another interview. You thought he would soon break down and tell all, given what he’d witnessed all those years ago, so you killed Barber. You couldn’t kill Vic, could you, even though he was the one who was carrying the secret, the most obvious victim? Did you know that Linda Lofthouse was Nick Barber’s birth mother?”

  Adams put his fist to his chest and seemed to stagger back a pace or two as if he had been hit. “My God, no!” he said. “I’m not admitting to anything,” he went on. “I talked to Robin, yes, made sure that he knew I knew, and that I was watching him. That’s all. The rest was an accident.”

  “You killed him to make certain. You knew he wouldn’t stop, that there would be more victims. And you knew he’d get caught eventually and bring it all tumbling down.”

  “The world’s a safer place without him, and that’s a fact. But I’m still not admitting anything. I’m guilty of no crime. There’s nothing you can do to me. Anyway, it would have been very easy just to reach out and…” Adams reached out his arm to demonstrate and let his hand fall on Banks’s shoulder. Then he smiled sadly, “…and just give a little push.” Almost twenty minutes now. The cavalry would arrive in moments.

  But he didn’t push. Banks, who had tensed, ready for a struggle, felt the hand relax on his shoulder, and he knew that Adams was about to turn away, that he had reached the end of his resources. Killing Nick Barber and seizing his notes was one thing, but killing a copper in cold blood was quite another.

  It all happened at once. Before Banks could move or say anything, he heard footsteps running down the lane, and someone shouted out his name. Then he heard a terrible scream from his left and a dark powerful figure came hurtling forward, crashing right into Adams and toppling both of them over into the deep end of the empty pool. The cavalry had arrived, but they were too late.

  By the time Annie and Winsome arrived on the scene, the ambulances had been and gone. It was getting dark, and the wind was howling through the trees and the nooks and crannies of Swainsview Lodge fit to wake the dead. The SOCOs had lit the scene with bright arc lamps and were still strutting about in their white boilersuits like spacemen on a mission. There were spatters of blood at the bottom of the pool mixed in with the other detritus. Annie saw Banks standing alone, head bowed, by the poolside and
walked over to him, touching him gently on the shoulder. “Okay?” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “I heard what happened.”

  “Greaves thought Adams was going to do to me what he saw him do to Robin Merchant all those years ago. Then the uniforms came dashing down the lane and frightened him. It’s nobody’s fault. I doubt that anyone could have foreseen it and stopped him.”

  “Wasn’t Adams going to push you in?”

  “No. He ran out of steam.”

  “But you think Greaves witnessed Adams push Merchant?”

  “I’m certain of it. He was on LSD at the time. That was what sent him over the edge. Can you imagine it? Adams has taken care of him ever since, protected him, as much for his own sake as anything. Persuaded him not to talk, maybe even persuaded him that it happened some other way. Greaves was so confused. He couldn’t trust his own judgment. But when he saw Adams rest his hand on my shoulder by the pool…”

  “It all came back?”

  “Something like that, in whatever fragmented and chaotic way Greaves’s mind works these days. However it happened, he snapped. He’d been like a coiled spring all those years. Adams protected him from anything that was likely to push him toward the snapping point. But when Barber appeared with his questions about Plymouth, Cardiff and Brighton, it was too much. Greaves had heard Adams’s conversation with Merchant at the pool, so somewhere in his messed-up mind he knew about these things, what Merchant had done. But he couldn’t confront it. He told Adams, who was terrified that Barber would push too hard and crack the veneer. So he killed him. Barber didn’t think he had anything to fear. He knew who Adams was, thought he’d come to talk to him. He was just having a chat, turning away, reaching for his cigarettes, then Adams picked up the poker, seized the moment. Luckily for him, he still had time to gather Barber’s stuff before the power cut.”