Piece of My Heart (14 page)

Annie was trying frantically to puzzle out why anyone would want to kill a music journalist, but she couldn’t come up with anything. Except drugs. Kelly Soames had said that she and Nick smoked a joint, but that meant nothing. Annie had smoked a few joints in her time, even while she was a copper. Even Banks had smoked joints. She wondered about Winsome and Kev Templeton. Kev’s drug of choice was probably E washed down with liberal amounts of Red Bull, but she didn’t know about Winsome. She seemed a clean-living girl, with her passion for the outdoors, and for potholing, but surely there had to be something. Anyway, it didn’t help very much knowing that Nick Barber smoked marijuana occasionally. She imagined it was par for the course in the rock business, whichever end of it you were in.

“Can you tell us anything about Nick’s life?” she asked. “We have so little to go on.”

“I can’t see how any of it would help you,” said Louise, “but we’ll do our best.”

“Did you see him often?”

“You know what it’s like when they leave home,” Louise said. “They phone and visit when they can. Our Nick was no better or worse than anyone else in that regard, I shouldn’t think.”

“So he was in touch regularly?”

“He phoned us once a week and tried to drop by whenever he could.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Her eyes filled with tears again. “Just the week before last. Friday. He was on his way up to Yorkshire, and he stopped over for the night. We always keep his old room ready for him, just in case.”

“Was there anything different about him?”

“different? What do you mean?”

“Did he seem fearful in any way?”

“No, not at all.”

“Was he depressed about anything?”

The Barbers looked at one another, then Louise replied. “No. Maybe a little preoccupied, but certainly not depressed. He seemed quite cheerful, as a matter of fact. Nick was never the most demonstrative of children, but he was generally even-tempered. He was no different this time from any other time he called by.”

“He wasn’t anxious about anything?”

“Not as far as we could tell. If anything, he was a bit more excited than usual.”

“Excited? About what?”

“He didn’t say. I think it might have been a story he was working on.”

“What was it about?”

“He never told us details like that. Not that we weren’t interested in his work, but I think he realized it would mean nothing to us. Besides, it was probably a ‘scoop.’ He’d learned to become secretive in his business.”

“Even from you?”

“The walls have ears. He’d developed an instinct. I don’t think it really mattered to whom he was talking.”

“So he didn’t mention any names?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Did he tell you why he was going to Yorkshire?”

“He said he’d found what sounded like a quiet place to write, and I think there was someone he wanted to see who lives up there.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Barber spread her hands. “I’m sorry. But I got the impression it was to do with what he was working on.”

Annie cursed under her breath. If only Nick had named names. If he’d thought his parents had the least interest in his passion, then he probably would have, despite his journalistic instinct to protect his scoop. “Is that what he was excited about?”

“I think so.”

“Can you add anything, Mr. Barber?”

Ross Barber shook his head. “No. As Louise said, the names of these groups and singers mean nothing to us. I think he’d learned there was no point in mentioning them. I’m afraid I glaze over in discussions like that. No doubt members of his own generation would be very impressed, but they went right over our heads.”

“I can understand that,” said Annie. “What do you know about Nick’s life in London?”

“He had a nice flat,” said Louise. “Didn’t he, Ross? Just off the Great West Road. We stayed there not so long ago on our way to Heathrow. He slept on the sofa and let us have his bedroom. Spotless, it was.”

“He didn’t live or share with anyone?”

“No. It was all his own.”

“Did you meet a girlfriend or a close friend? Anyone?”

“No. He took us out for dinner somewhere in the West End. The next day we flew to New York. Ross and I have old friends there, and they invited us for our fortieth wedding anniversary.”

“That’s nice,” said Annie. “So you don’t really know much at all about Nick’s life in London?”

“I think he worked all the hours God sent. He didn’t have time for girlfriends and relationships and that sort of thing. I’m sure he would have settled down eventually.”

In Annie’s admittedly limited experience, if someone had reached the age of thirty-eight without “settling down,” you were a fool if you held your breath and waited for him to do so, but she also knew that many more people were holding off committing to relationships for much longer these days, herself included. “I know this is a rather delicate question,” Annie asked, “and I don’t want to upset you, but did Nick ever have anything to do with drugs?”

“Well,” said Ross, “we assumed he experimented, of course, like so many young people today, but we never saw him under the influence of anything more than a couple of pints of bitter, or perhaps a small whisky. We’re fairly liberal about things like that. I mean, you can’t teach in a university for as long as I did and not have some knowledge of marijuana. But if he did use drugs at all, they didn’t interfere with his job or his health, and we certainly never noticed any signs, did we?”

“No,” Louise agreed.

It was a fair answer, if not entirely what Annie had expected. She sensed that Ross Barber was being as honest as he could be. The Barbers clearly loved their son and were distraught over his death, but there seemed to have been some sort of communication gap between them. They were proud of his achievements, but not interested in the actual achievements themselves. Nick might well have interviewed Coldplay or Oasis, but Annie could just imagine Ross Barber saying, “That’s very nice, son,” as he pored over his ancient tomes. She couldn’t think of anything else to ask and glanced over at Winsome, who
shrugged. Perhaps Banks would have done better; perhaps she wasn’t asking the right questions, but she couldn’t think of any more. They would have a quick look in Nick’s room, just in case he had left anything of interest, then maybe catch a pub lunch somewhere on the way back. After that, Annie would check in at the incident van and give Banks a ring. He’d want to know what she had found out, no matter how little it was.

Saturday, September 13, 1969

The young man in the greasy overalls was standing with a spanner in his hand surrounded by pieces of a dismantled motorbike when Chadwick arrived at the garage later that afternoon. According to the car radio, Leeds were one–nil up.

“Vincent Black Lightning, 1952,” the young man said. “Lovely machine. How can I help you?”

Chadwick showed his warrant card. “Are you Donald Hughes?”

Hughes immediately looked cagey, put down the spanner and wiped his hands on his greasy overalls. “Maybe,” he said. “Depends why you want to know.”

Chadwick’s immediate inclination was to tell the kid to stop messing about and come up with some answers, but he realized that Hughes might not know yet about Linda’s murder, and that his reaction to the news could reveal a lot. Perhaps a softer approach would be best, then, at least to start with.

“Maybe you’d better sit down, laddie,” he said.

“Why?”

There were two fold-up chairs in the garage. Instead of answering, Chadwick sat on one. A little dazed, Hughes followed suit. The dim garage smelled of oil, petrol and warm metal. It was still raining outside, and he could hear the steady dripping of water from the gutters.

“What is it?” Hughes asked. “Has something happened to mum?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Chadwick. “Read the papers much?”

“Nah. Nothing but bad news.”

“Hear about the festival up at Brimleigh Glen last weekend?”

“Hard not to.”

“Were you there?”

“Nah. Not my cup of tea. Look, why are you asking all these questions?”

“A young girl was killed there,” he said. “Stabbed.” When Hughes said nothing, he continued, “We’ve good reason to believe that she was Linda Lofthouse.”

“Linda? But…she…bloody hell…” Hughes turned pale.

“She what?”

“She went off to live in London.”

“She was at Brimleigh for the festival.”

“I should have known. Look,” he said, “I’m really sorry to hear about what happened. It was a long time ago, though, me and Linda. Another lifetime, it seems.”

“Two years isn’t very long. People have held grudges longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Revenge is a dish that’s best eaten cold.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Let’s suppose we start at the beginning,” said Chadwick. “You and Linda.”

“We went out together for a couple of years when we were fifteen and sixteen, that’s all.”

“And she had your baby.”

Hughes looked down at his oily hands in his lap. “Yeah, well…I tried to make it right, asked her to marry me and all.”

“That’s not the way I hear it.”

“Look, all right. At first I was scared. Wouldn’t you be? I was only sixteen, I didn’t have no job, nothing. We left school. Linda stayed at home with her mum and dad that summer and had the baby, and I…I don’t know, I suppose I brooded about it. Anyway, I decided in the end we should make a go of it. I had a job here at the garage by then and I thought…you know…that we might have had a chance, after all.”

“But?”

“She didn’t want to know, did she? By then she’d got her head full of this hippie rubbish. Bob bloody Dylan and his stupid songs and all the rest of it.”

“When did this start?”

“Before we split up. Just little things. Always correcting me when I said something wrong, like she was a bloody grammar expert. Talking about poets and singers I’d never heard of, reincarnation and karma and I don’t know what else. Always arguing. It was like she wasn’t interested in a normal life.”

“What about her new friends?”

“Long-haired pillocks and poxy birds. I hadn’t time for any of them.”

“Did she chuck you?”

“You could say that.”

“And when you came back, cap in hand, she wanted nothing more to do with you?”

“I suppose so. Then she buggered off to London soon as she’d had the kid. Put him up for adoption.
My
son.”

“Did you follow her down there?”

“I’d had enough by then. Let her go with her poncy new friends and take all the drugs she wanted.”

“Did she take drugs when she was with you?”

“No, not that I knew of. I wouldn’t have stood for it. But that’s what they do, isn’t it?”

“So they stole her from you, did they? The hippies?”

He looked away. “I suppose you could say that.”

“Made you angry enough to do her harm?”

Hughes stood so violently that his chair tipped over. “What are you getting at? Are you trying to say I killed her?”

“Calm down, laddie. I have to ask these questions. It’s a murder investigation.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m not your murderer.”

“Got a bit of a quick temper, though, haven’t you?”

Hughes said nothing. He picked up the chair and sat again, folding his arms across his chest.

“Did you ever meet any of Linda’s new friends?”

Hughes rubbed the back of his hand across his upper lip and nose. “She took me to this house once,” he said. “I think she wanted me to be like her, and she thought maybe she’d convince me by introducing me to her new friends.”

“When was this?”

“Just after she left school. That summer.”

“1967? When she was pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“We weren’t getting along well at all. Like I said before, she was weird, into all sorts of weird stuff I didn’t understand, like tarot cards and astrology and all that crap. This one time she was going to see some friends and I didn’t want her to go–I wanted her to come to the pictures with me to see
You Only Live Twice
–but she said she didn’t want to see some stupid James Bond film, and if I wanted to be with her I could come along. If I didn’t…well…she made it clear I didn’t have much choice. So I thought, What the hell, let’s see what’s going on here.”

“Do you remember
where
she took you?”

“I dunno. It was off Roundhay Road, near that big pub at the junction with Spenser Place.”

“The Gaiety?”

“That’s the one.”

Chadwick knew it. There weren’t many coppers in Leeds, plainclothes or uniformed, who didn’t. “Do you remember the name of the street?”

“No, but it was just over Roundhay Road.”

“One of the Bayswaters?” Chadwick knew the area, a densely packed triangle of streets full of small terraced houses between Roundhay Road, Bayswater Road and Harehills Road. It didn’t have a particularly bad reputation, but quite a few of the houses had been rented to students, and where there were students there were probably drugs.

“That’s the place.”

“Do you know which one?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I think it was the terrace. Or maybe the crescent.”

“Remember where the house was?”

“About halfway.”

“Which side of the street?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Was there anything odd about the place from the outside?”

“No. It looked just like all the others.”

“What colour was the door?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay. Thanks,” said Chadwick. Maybe he could find it. It was frustrating to be so close but still so far. Even so, it was probably a cold lead. The students who had been there two years ago might have graduated and left town by now. If they
were
students.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. There were these people, about five of them, hippies, like, in funny clothes. Freaks.”

“Were they students?”

“Maybe some of them were. I don’t know. They didn’t say. The place smelled like a tart’s window box.”

“That bad?”

“Some sort of perfume smell, anyway. I think it was something they were smoking. One or two of them were definitely on
something
. You could tell by their eyes and the rubbish they were spouting.”