Piece of My Heart (11 page)

“Are you the policeman?”

“Detective Inspector Chadwick.” He showed his warrant card.

She glanced at it, then looked Chadwick up and down before unfastening the chain. “Come in. You’ll have to excuse the mess.”

And he did. She deposited the baby in a wooden playpen in a living room untidy with toys, discarded clothing and magazines. It–he couldn’t tell whether it was a girl or a boy–stood and gawped at him for a moment, then started rattling the bars and crying. The cream carpet was stained with only God knew what, and the room smelled of unwashed nappies and warm milk. A television set stood in one corner, and a radio was playing somewhere: Kenny Everett. Chadwick only knew who it was because Yvonne liked to listen to him, and he recognized the inane patter and the clumsy attempts at humour. When it came to radio, Chadwick preferred quiz programs and news.

He took the chair the woman offered, giving it a quick once-over first to make sure it was clean, and plucking at the crease in his trousers before he sat. The maisonette had a small balcony, but there were no chairs outside. Chadwick imagined the woman had to be careful because of her baby. More than once a young child had crawled onto a balcony and fallen off, despite the guardrail.

Trying to distance himself from the noise, the smell and the mess, Chadwick focused on the woman as she sat down opposite him and lit a cigarette. She was pale and careworn, wearing a baggy fawn cardigan and shapeless checked slacks. Dirty blonde hair hung down to her shoulders. She might have been fifteen or thirty.

“You said on the phone that you think you know the woman whose picture was in the paper?”

“I think so,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure. That’s why I took so long to ring you. I had to think about it.”

“Are you sure now?”

“Well, no, not really. I mean, her hair was different and everything. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Something about her, that’s all.”

Chadwick opened his briefcase and took out the photograph of the dead girl, head and shoulders. He warned Carol what to expect, and she seemed to brace herself, drawing an exceptionally deep lungful of smoke. When she looked at the photo, she put her hand to her chest. Slowly, she let the smoke out. “I’ve never seen a dead person before,” she said.

“Do you recognize her?”

She passed the photo back and nodded. “Funnily enough, this looks more like her than the drawing, even though she is dead.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Yes. I think it’s Linda. Linda Lofthouse.”

“How did you know her?”

“We went to school together.” She jerked her head in a generally northern direction. “Sandford Girls’. She was in the same class as me.” At least the victim was local, then, which made
the investigation a lot easier. Still, it made perfect sense. While many young people would have made the pilgrimage from all parts of the country to the Brimleigh Festival, Chadwick guessed that the majority of those attending would have been from a bit closer to home–Leeds, Bradford, York, Harrogate and the surrounding areas–as the event was practically on their doorstep.

“When was this?”

“I left school two years ago last July, when I was sixteen. Linda left the same year. We were almost the same age.”

Eighteen and one kid already. Chadwick wondered if she had a husband. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which didn’t mean much in itself, but there didn’t seem to be any evidence of male presence, as far as he could see. Anyway, the age was about right for the victim. “Were you friends?”

Carol paused. “I thought so,” she said, “but after we’d left school we didn’t see much of one another.”

“Why not?”

“Linda got pregnant after Christmas in her final year, just before she turned sixteen.” She looked at her own child and gave a harsh laugh. “At least I waited until I’d left school and got married.”

“The father?”

“He’s at work. Tom’s not a bad bloke, really.”

So she was married. In a way, Chadwick felt relieved. “I meant the father of Linda’s child.”

“Oh, him. She was going out with Donald Hughes at the time. I just assumed, you know, like…”

“Did they marry, live together?”

“Not that I know of. Linda…well, she was getting a bit weird that last year at school, if you must know.”

“In what way?”

“The way she dressed, like she didn’t care anymore. And she was more in her own world, wherever that was. She kept getting into trouble for not paying attention in class, but it wasn’t as if she was stupid or anything, she even did okay in her O levels, despite being pregnant. She was just…”

“In her own world?”

“Yes. The teachers didn’t know what to do with her. If they said anything, she’d give them a right clever answer. She had some nerve. And that last year she sort of stopped hanging around with us–you know, there were a few of us, me, Linda, Julie and Anita used to go down the Locarno on a Saturday night, have a good dance and see if there were any decent lads around.” She blushed. “Sometimes we’d go to Le Phonograph later if we could get in. Most of us could pass for eighteen, but sometimes they got a bit picky at the door. You know what it’s like.”

“So Linda became a bit of a loner?”

“Yes. And this was before she got pregnant, like. Quiet. Liked to read. Not schoolbooks. Poetry and stuff. And she loved Bob Dylan.”

“Didn’t the rest of you?”

“He’s all right, I suppose, but you can’t dance to him, can you? And I can’t understand a word he’s singing about, if you can call it singing.”

Chadwick didn’t know whether he had ever heard Bob Dylan, though he did know the name, so he was thankful the question was rhetorical. Dancing had never been a skill he possessed in any great measure, though he had met Janet at a dance and that had seemed to go well enough. “Did she have any enemies, anyone who really disliked her?”

“No, nothing like that. I mean, you couldn’t
hate
Linda. You’d know what I mean if you’d met her.”

“Did she ever get into any fights or serious disagreements with anyone?”

“No, never.”

“Do you know if she was taking drugs?”

“She never said so, and I never saw her do anything like that. Not that I’d have known, I suppose.”

“Where did she live?”

“On the Sandford estate with her mum and dad. Though I heard her dad died a short while ago. In the spring. Sudden, like. Heart attack.”

“Can you give me her mother’s address?”

Carol told him.

“Do you know if she had the child?”

“About two years ago.”

“That would be September 1967?”

“Around that time, yes. But I never saw her after school broke up that July. I got married and Tom and me set up house here and all. Then little Andy came along.”

“Have you ever bumped into her since then?”

“No. I heard that she’d moved away down south after the baby was born. London.”

Maybe she had, Chadwick thought. That would explain why she hadn’t been immediately missed. As Carol had said, the likeness in the newspaper wasn’t a particularly good one, and a lot of people don’t pay attention to the papers anyway. “Have you any idea what happened to the baby, or the father?”

“I’ve seen Don around. He’s been going out with Pamela Davis for about a year now. I think they might be engaged. He works in a garage on Kirkstall Road, near the viaduct. I remember Linda talking about having the baby adopted. I don’t think she planned on keeping it.”

The mother would probably know, not that it mattered.

Whoever had killed Linda Lofthouse, it wasn’t a two-year-old. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Linda?” he asked.

“Not really,” said Carol. “I mean, I don’t know what you want to hear. We
were
best friends, but we sort of drifted apart, as you do. I don’t know what she got up to the last two years. I’m sorry to hear that she was killed, though. That’s terrible. Why would somebody do a thing like that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Chadwick, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. He didn’t think it came over very well. He stood up. “Thanks for your time, and for the information.”

“You’ll let me know? When you find out.”

“I’ll let you know,” said Chadwick, standing up. “Please, stay here with the baby. I’ll let myself out.”

“What’s up with you, then?” asked Cyril, the landlord of the Queen’s Arms, as Banks ordered a bitter lemon and ice late that afternoon. “Doctor’s orders?”

“More like boss’s orders,” Banks grumbled. “We’ve got a new super. She’s dead keen and seems to have eyes in the back of her bloody head.”

“She’ll get nowt out of me,” said Cyril. “My lips are sealed.”

Banks laughed. “Cheers, mate. Maybe another time.”

“Bad for business, this new boss of yours.”

“Give us time,” said Banks, with a wink. “We’ll get her trained.”

He took his glass over to a dimpled, copper-topped table over by the window and contemplated its unappetizing contents gloomily. The ashtray was half-full of crushed filters and ash. Banks pushed it as far away as he could. Now that he no longer smoked, he’d come to loathe the smell of cigarettes. He’d never noticed it before, as a smoker, but when he got
home from the pub his clothes stank and he had to put them straight in the laundry basket. Which would be fine if he got around to doing his laundry more often.

Annie turned up at six o’clock, as arranged. She’d been at Fordham earlier, Banks knew, and had talked to Kelly Soames. She got herself a Britvic orange and joined him. “Christ,” she said, when she saw Banks’s drink. “They’ll be thinking we’re all on the wagon.”

“Too true. Good day?”

“Not bad, I suppose. You?”

Banks swirled the liquid in his glass. Ice clinked against the sides. “I’ve had better,” he said. “Just come from the post-mortem.”

“Ah.”

“No picnic. Never is. Even after all these years, you never get quite used to it.”

“I know,” said Annie.

“Anyway,” Banks went on, “we weren’t far wrong in our original suspicions. Nick Barber was in generally good health apart from being bashed on the back of the head with a poker. It fits the wound, and Dr. Glendenning says he was hit four times, once when he was standing up, which accounts for most of the blood spatter, and three times when he was on the floor.”

Annie raised an eyebrow. “Overkill?”

“Not necessarily. The doc said it needn’t have been a frenzied attack, just that whoever did it wanted to make sure his victim was dead. In all likelihood he’d have got a bit of blood on him, too, so that might give us something we can use in court if we ever catch the bastard. Anyway, there were no prints on the poker, so our killer obviously wiped it clean.”

“What do you make of it all?”

“I don’t know,” said Banks, sipping bitter lemon and pulling
a face. “It certainly doesn’t look professional, and it wasn’t frenzied enough to look like a lover’s quarrel, not that we can rule that out.”

“I doubt if the motive was robbery, either.” Annie told Banks more detail than she had given him over the phone about her conversation with Kelly Soames and what little she had discovered about Barber from her.

“And the timing is interesting,” Banks added.

“What do you mean?”

“Was he killed before or after the power cut? All the doc can tell us is that it probably happened between six and eight. One bloke left the pub at seven and came back around quarter past. The others bear this out, but nobody saw him in Lyndgarth. Banks consulted his notes. Name of Calvin Soames.”

“Soames?” said Annie. “That’s the barmaid’s name. Kelly Soames. He must be her father. I recognized him when he dropped her off.”

“That’s right,” said Banks.

“She said he’s always in the pub when she’s working. I know she was terrified of him finding out about her and Nick.”

“I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow.”

“Go carefully, Alan. He didn’t know about her and Nick Barber. Apparently he’s a very strict father.”

“That’s not such a terrible thing, is it? Anyway, I’ll do my best. But if he really
did
know…”

“I understand,” said Annie.

“And don’t forget Jack Tanner,” said Banks. “We don’t know what motive he might have had, but he had a connection with the victim, through his wife. We’d better check his alibi thoroughly.”

“It’s being done,” said Annie. “Ought to be easy enough to check with his darts cronies. And I’ve got Kev following up on
all the blokes who left the pub between the relevant times.”

“Good. Now the tourist couple, the Browns, say they arrived at about a quarter to eight and thought they saw a car heading up the hill, right?”

Annie consulted the notes she had taken in the incident van. “Someone from the youth hostel, a New Zealander called Vanessa Napier, told PC Travers that she saw a car going by at about half past seven or a quarter to eight on Friday evening, shortly after the lights went off. She was looking out of her window at the storm.”

“Did she get any details?”

“No. It was dark, and she doesn’t know a Honda from a Fiat.”

“Doesn’t help us much, does it?”

“It’s all we’ve got. They questioned everyone in the hostel and Vanessa’s the only one who saw anything.”

“She’s not another one been shagging our Nick, too, has she?”

Annie laughed. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“Hmm,” Banks said. “There seem to have been more comings and goings between half past seven and eight than there were earlier.”

“Yorkshire Electricity confirms the power went out at 7:28 p.m.”

“The problem is,” Banks went on, “that if the killer came from some distance away and timed his arrival for half seven or a quarter to eight, he can’t have known there would be a power cut, so it’s not a factor.”

“Maybe it gave him an opportunity,” Annie said. “They’re arguing, the lights go out, Nick turns to reach for his cigarette lighter and the killer seizes the moment and lashes out.”

“Possibly,” said Banks. “Though the darkness would have
made it a bit harder for him to search the cottage and be certain he took away everything he needed to. Also, your eyes need time to adjust. Look at the timing. Mrs. Tanner showed up at eight. That didn’t give him much time to search in the dark and check Barber’s car.”