When the Music's Over (34 page)

Bradley thought for a moment. “Well, no, not really.”

“You knew he was married?”

“He was wearing a wedding ring, and we found out just a day or two later that he had a wife, yes. But none of that really counted for anything. There were plenty of homos who were married. Especially then. They felt it gave them some sort of immunity, or maybe they were in denial. We just made the assumption that he used his business trips around the country to satisfy his perverse cravings.”

“Did you talk to Monaghan's wife?”

“I didn't. No.”

“Did DI Chadwick?”

“I don't know. If he did, he didn't say anything to me about it.”

“But it is possible that Monaghan might not have been gay, isn't it?” Winsome persisted.

“I suppose so. But what was he doing there?”

“Maybe it was as you said earlier. Maybe he just needed to use the toilet. Did you find out where he'd been that evening? Had he been drinking? Dinner with friends? Business colleagues? I mean, if he'd had a few pints, it would make sense that he'd need to relieve himself. Where was he coming from? Which direction was he heading? Back to the hotel? Why was he walking alone?”

“We didn't get to ask all those questions. Who could we have asked them of? We didn't get time to trace his movements.”

“So maybe the student was right, after all. But didn't it bother you? You said you talked to his employer in London. Did you find out what he was working on up north?”

“No. They said they respected their clients' confidentiality. I argued with them, but it was no good. They said I'd have had to get a court order, and the whole investigation came to a halt before I could do anything like that.”

“Did you ever wonder why?”

“Of course I did.”

“Come up with any ideas?”

“Not really.”

“Would it surprise you to find out that Tony Monaghan was in Leeds because he worked for Danny Caxton, who was appearing in pantomime in Bradford that Christmas?”

Bradley flinched as if he'd been kicked. “I'd bloody well say it would, yes. Where did you find that out?”

“It came up in our inquiries,” Winsome said. “So you've got two cases now, only weeks apart, both nipped in the bud, and both starring Danny Caxton. What do you think of that?”

“I don't know what to think. If I'd known at the time—”

“Oh, come on, Simon,” Banks cut in. “Surely you've got a bit of imagination.”

“Well . . . I suppose, you know, if Monaghan was queer and he was connected with someone high up—”

“Like Caxton? Or a senior police officer?”

“Maybe the chief constable. Or a local politician, bigwig, whatever. Well, if there was a such a connection, maybe a little influence had been brought to bear. They'd want to keep something like that quiet, wouldn't they, legal or not.”

“Do you think DI Chadwick knew about this connection?”

“No. I very much doubt it,” said Bradley. “I think they kept him as much in the dark as they did me. Like I said, he seemed pissed off at being told to give it up. See, there was always one thing that rankled.”

“Oh?” said Banks. “And what was that?”

“It was the body. I mean, it was gruesome enough, and all, no doubt about that.”

“So what was wrong?”

“The position, partly. It just didn't seem right, Chiller thought, didn't seem natural he would have fallen the way he had.”

“But you don't know for certain that's what happened?”

“It's what the pathologist said at the scene. Course, we never got a proper postmortem report. Not that I ever saw.” He shook his head slowly. “Look, I'm bloody gobsmacked by all this. Are you sure you're right?”

“We only have a few facts, Mr. Bradley,” said Winsome. “That's all. What we've told you is true as far as it goes. Obviously, we need to know a lot more. Can you think of anything else?”

“Just something Chiller said. I wouldn't have known because it was my first, like.”

“What was it?”

“There wasn't enough blood. If he'd been killed where we found him, he wouldn't have fallen the way he was lying and there would have been a lot more blood.”

“Did the pathologist remark on this?” Banks asked.

“I think so. It's a long time ago. But if he did, it was in a sort of offhand way, like it might not mean anything, or there might be a simple explanation. I've since found out that not all knife wounds bleed a lot. The cut ends sort of form a seal. But one of the thrusts had severed a major artery, the femoral. There should have been more blood. But, like I said earlier, the weather was foul and we certainly didn't find any traces of blood in the park.”

“So DI Chadwick suspected that your student might have been right about what he saw, and Tony Monaghan was killed elsewhere and dumped in the toilets?” Banks said.

“I'm not sure he actually came out with it like that, but yes, it seems that way.”

“Which brings a whole lot of assumptions into question,” said Banks, giving Winsome the nod to get ready to leave. “Simon, I know it's not easy, remembering,” he said. “But do you think you could write down what you've just told us, and anything else you can remember about the case?” Banks gave him a card. “You can email it to me, if you like. Or fax it.”

Bradley took the card. “Yes. Yes, of course.” He smiled at Winsome. “Nice to meet you, lass.” He stood up and shook their hands. “Let me—”

“Don't worry,” said Banks. “We can find our way out. Thanks.”

As they were leaving, Banks glanced behind him. He had noticed a cabinet by the wall, and he saw a pale Bradley open its door and take out a bottle of dark amber liquid. Just before he closed the front door
behind him, he heard Bradley call out, “Pam? Pam? Where's the bloody glasses, love? I need a drink.”

Excerpt from Linda Palmer's Memoir

We found the Coffee Cellar on our third day, the second having been spent mostly on the beach. It was a scorcher, and we slathered ourselves in Ambre Solaire and just lay there on towels on the sand letting the rays tan us. Those were the days when it was called suntan cream rather than sunblock. You could even buy stuff that would give you a tan if you just rubbed it on, but you ended up orange and obviously fake.

The Coffee Cellar was a bohemian establishment. At least, that was what Melanie said. She liked to use words like that. You walked down some narrow wooden stairs in the dark, moved aside the beaded curtains and there you were, all dim shaded lights, brick walls pied with saltpeter, fishnets on the ceiling and upturned barrels for tables. There was a boy in a striped shirt working a hissing espresso machine behind the wooden counter. French posters hung on the walls—mostly cafe and cabaret scenes. I didn't recognize them at the time, but in my student days I came to know the familiar Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir prints so popular in beatnik cafes of the fifties and sixties. Half-naked cancan dancers, prostitutes, absinthe drinkers, decadent poets sitting around outside Left Bank cafes arguing about philosophy.

The music was good, or so we thought. A lot more adventurous than the usual cafe fare. More “Brighter Shade of Pale” and “Light My Fire” than “Puppet on a String” and “The Last Waltz.” And we could smoke down there. Melanie and I smoked Sobranie Black Russians, Pall Mall filter tips, Peter Stuyvesant or those funny pastel-coloed tubes. We wouldn't be seen dead with Woodies or Park Drive. We felt very grown-up and sophisticated in our coffee bar, smoking our exotic cigarettes, but perhaps to the boy behind the counter we just looked like two fourteen-year-olds trying to act older. He was always nice to us, though,
and he even gave us a free biscuit each with our coffee one morning. I'd been smoking for about a year by the time I was fourteen, as had Melanie, though at first it had made me sick, and I had to work at it to get it right. We were secretive about it, of course—our parents would have killed us if they had known. I noticed my mother sniffing once or twice when we sat down for the evening meal, but when she mentioned the smell of smoke, I told her we'd been for a Coke at one of the seafront cafes in the afternoon, and the smoke must have got in our hair or clothes. You could smoke everywhere then.

That first week, Melanie and I fell into a routine: Coffee Cellar, amusements arcades, pier, Golden Mile and beach. Most evenings we spent at Pleasure Beach, though it never got really dark enough for the full impact of bright lights at that time of year. We didn't usually go to the Coffee Cellar in the evenings. We tried it once, but it was full of a different crowd, people in black polo-neck sweaters with their hair over their collars. Even a couple of berets and beards. No stools left. They were an older crowd, too, and they looked at us as if we were just kids, which I suppose we were.

It might have been the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and even in London, for all we knew, but we were in Blackpool, where it was just a normal summer. I'd heard
Sgt Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band
, I remember, and I didn't know what to make of it, though I thought “She's Leaving Home” was one of the saddest, most beautiful songs I'd ever heard. I wanted to be a songwriter as well as a singer and famous actress. What can I say? I was fourteen. I suppose here I'm trying to explain why I walked so naively into what happened on Saturday, and that was certainly a part of it, my desire to be a singer and songwriter.
Do Your Own Thing!
might have been mostly for the boring old grown-ups, but they did occasionally have someone on with a guitar, like Donovan, who sang his own songs. Why not me?

And I was also at that time an inveterate autograph hunter. I don't suppose it's a very popular pastime these days, but it certainly was in the sixties. It seems to be the sort of thing no one
does anymore, like having a pen pal or trainspotting. I mean, having an email pal and writing down diesel engine numbers doesn't make it, does it? And stars are either too inaccessible or too busy pretending to be just like you and me that you wouldn't even think of asking them for their signatures in a little book. Then you get people like Russell Brand signing his autograph on young girls' bare breasts.

Back then, you could buy all kinds of fancy autograph books with different colored pages and golden edging between fake burgundy leather covers or William Morris designs with “Autographs” engraved on the front in gold leaf script. They had their own shape, what you'd call “landscape” in these days of computer printers. Even my dad had an autograph book—he showed me it—and he had Nat Gonella and Harry James and lots of people I had never heard of who were famous in his time.

Mine wasn't as full, and I do confess to writing away on occasion with a stamped self-addressed envelope and receiving a signed photograph in return. Or sticking in a scrap of paper I happened to have with me at the time. Blackpool was always good for autographs because of all the summer season shows there. Since I first started collecting, when I was twelve, I got Frank Ifield, Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Tarbuck, Les Dawson, Adam Faith, Sandie Shaw, Marty Wilde, Heinz from the Tornados, Des O'Connor, Cilla Black, Scott Walker, Tommy Cooper, Gerry Marsden, Paul Jones, Gene Vincent and Karl Denver. I could've got the Bachelors once, too, if I'd waited longer, but I was too near the back of the crowd.

Maybe I was stupid to get in that fancy car with Danny Caxton, but my autograph hunting took me to him and my artistic ambitions caused me to go with him to the hotel.

GERRY KICKED
off her shoes and went over to turn on the shaded table lamp. It wasn't quite dark yet, but it was getting there. It had been a long day, and all she wanted to do was put her feet up with a good book and a cup of herbal tea. First, though, she went into the
bedroom and changed out of her work clothes. She felt a bit sticky from the day's humidity and thought a shower might help—one of her little luxuries was that the flat came with a power shower—so she got straight in before she could talk herself out of it. Coming out feeling and smelling clean with her long hair still wet and hanging over her shoulders, she put on sweat pants and a T-shirt and walked through to the small kitchenette to put the kettle on.

The flat she rented on the fringes of Eastvale College campus was a sort of attic that took up the top floor of an old house. Not exactly a penthouse, but she had a nice view beyond the streets of student housing and the college itself to the woods and hills in the west. She could even see the meandering silver line of the River Swain as it made its progress into Eastvale from its source high in the hills. The living room was spacious and comfortable, with a dormer window, a sofa and two armchairs, the bedroom adequate, the en suite a delight and the kitchenette all right if all you wanted was tea and toast. There was no stove, but there was a hot plate for fry-ups, not that she ever ate those. Mostly she ate out, and lightly at that. It was a student area so there were plenty of cheap cafes and takeaways of every variety—even kebab and pizza combined.

Gerry opened the window and felt the merest hint of a breeze. She could hear the sound of a student party from across the street—the occasional whoop over pounding dance beats. They wouldn't go on too late, they never did, except at the end of term. Now it was mostly just summer students. The threatening sky that had dogged most of the day and presaged a storm seemed to have broken up without coming to fruition, and she could see a half moon through a rent in the cloud cover and, here and there, a bright star shining through a thin veil of cloud.

She made her tea and sat in the comfortable armchair she liked best for reading. With some Chopin nocturnes playing quietly in the background, she picked up her Kindle and started reading
Fifty Shades of Grey
. It had taken her two years to get around to it after an acquaintance in her Pilates class had recommended it, and it took her about fifteen minutes to press “Home.” It wasn't just the bad writing, she didn't get the point of it. She wasn't a prude, though it had
been a while since she'd had a boyfriend. That was because she didn't have the time, not lack of inclination—now her life was all studying for exams, courses, and work work work. There was simply no room for a boyfriend, and she was not the kind of girl to favor one-night stands or the casual fuck-buddy arrangement. Sometimes she felt sad and lonely, but mostly she loved her job and its possibilities so much she didn't mind too much. She scrolled through her small collection for something else to read and decided on Elena Ferrante's latest in the Neapolitan series. She had followed the adventures of Elena and Lila right from the start.