Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  Piece Of My Heart

  Peter Robinson

  As volunteers clean up after a huge outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire in 1969, they discover the body of a young woman wrapped in a sleeping bag. She has been brutally murdered. The detective assigned to the case, Stanley Chadwick, is a hard-headed, strait-laced veteran of the Second World War. He could not have less in common with – or less regard for – young, disrespectful, long-haired hippies, smoking marijuana and listening to the pulsing sounds of rock and roll. But he has a murder to solve, and it looks as if the victim was somehow associated with the up-and-coming psychedelic pastoral band the Mad Hatters. In the present, Inspector Alan Banks is investigating the murder of a freelance music journalist, who was working on a feature about the Mad Hatters for “MOJO” magazine. This is not the first time that the Mad Hatters, now aging rock superstars, have been brushed by tragedy. Banks finds he has to delve into the past to find out exactly what hornet’s nest the journalist inadvertently stirred up.

  Peter Robinson

  Piece Of My Heart

  Book 16 in the Inspector Banks series, 2006

  FOR SHEILA

  Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the source of its marvels.

  – Francisco Goya, 1799

  The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

  – William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790-93

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday, 8th September, 1969

  To an observer looking down from the peak of Brimleigh Beacon early that Monday morning, the scene below might have resembled the aftermath of a battle. It had rained briefly during the night, and the pale sun coaxed tendrils of mist from the damp earth. They swirled over fields dotted with motionless shapes, mingling here and there with the darker smoke of smoldering embers. Human scavengers picked their way through the carnage as if collecting discarded weapons, occasionally bending to extract an object of value from a dead man’s pocket. Others appeared to be shoveling soil or quicklime into large open graves. The light wind carried a whiff of rotting flesh.

  And over the whole scene a terrible stillness reigned.

  But to Dave Sampson, down on the field, there had been no battle, only a peaceful gathering, and Dave had the worm’s-eye view. It was just after 8:00 a.m., and he had been up half the night along with everyone else listening to Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. Now, the crowd had gone home, and he was moving among the motionless shapes, litter left behind by the vanished hordes, helping to clean up after the very first Brimleigh Festival. Here he was, bent over, back aching like hell, eyes burning with tiredness, plodding across the muddy field picking up rubbish. The eerie sounds of Jimmy Page playing his electric guitar with a violin bow still echoed in his mind as he shoved cellophane wrappers and half-eaten Mars bars into his plastic bag.

  Ants and beetles crawled over the remains of sandwiches and half-empty tins of cold baked beans. Flies buzzed around the feces and wasps hovered about the necks of empty pop bottles. More than once, Dave had to maneuver sharply to avoid being stung. He couldn’t believe some of the stuff people left behind. Food wrappers, soggy newspapers and magazines, used Durex, tampons, cigarette ends, knickers, empty beer cans and roaches you’d expect, but what on earth had the person who left the Underwood typewriter been thinking of? Or the wooden crutch? Had a cripple, suddenly healed by the music, run off and left it behind?

  There were other things, too, things best avoided. The makeshift toilets set over the open cesspit had been uninviting, as well as few and far between, and the queues had been long, encouraging more than one desperate person to find a quiet spot elsewhere in the field. Dave glanced toward the craters and felt glad that he wasn’t one of the volunteers assigned to fill them up with earth.

  In an otherwise isolated spot at the southern edge of the field, where the land rose gently toward the fringes of Brimleigh Woods, Dave noticed an abandoned sleeping bag. The closer he got, the more it looked to be occupied. Had someone passed out or simply gone to sleep? More likely, Dave thought, it was drugs. All night the medical tent had been open to people suffering hallucinations from bad acid, and there had been enough Mandrax and opiated hash around to knock out an army.

  Dave prodded the bag with his foot. It felt soft and heavy. He prodded it again, harder this time. Still nothing. It definitely felt as if there was someone inside. Finally, he bent and pulled the zip, and when he saw what was there, he wished he hadn’t.

  Monday, 8th September, 1969

  Detective Inspector Stanley Chadwick was at his desk in Brotherton House before eight o’clock Monday morning, as usual, with every intention of finishing off the paperwork that had piled up during his two weeks’ annual leave at the end of August. The caravan at Primrose Valley, with Janet and Yvonne, had made a nice haven for a while, but Yvonne was obviously restless as only a sixteen-year-old on holiday with her parents can be, and crime didn’t stop while he was away from Leeds. Nor, apparently, did the paperwork.

  It had been a good weekend. Yorkshire beat Derbyshire in the Gillette Cup Final, and if Leeds United, coming off a season as league champions, hadn’t managed to beat Manchester United at home, at least they had come out of it with a 2-2 draw, and Billy Bremner had scored.

  The only blot on the landscape was that Yvonne had stayed out most of the night on Sunday, and it wasn’t the first time. Chadwick had lain awake until he heard her come in at about half past six, and by then it was time for him to get up and get ready for work. Yvonne had gone straight to her room and closed her door, so he had put off the inevitable confrontation until later, and now it was gnawing at him. He didn’t know what was happening to his daughter, what she was up to, but whatever it was, it frightened him. It seemed that the younger generation had been getting stranger and stranger over the past few years, more out of control, and Chadwick felt unable to find any point of connection with them anymore. Most of them were like members of another species to him now. Especially his own daughter.

  Chadwick tried to shake off his worries about Yvonne and glanced over the crime sheets: trouble with squatters in a Leeds city center office building; a big drugs bust in Chapeltown; an assault on a woman with a stone in a sock in Bradford. Manningham Lane, he noticed, and everyone knew what kind of women you found on Manningham Lane. Still, poor cow, nobody deserved to be hit with a stone in a sock. Just over the county border, in the North Riding, the Brimleigh Festival had gone off peacefully enough, with only a few arrests for drunkenness and drug dealing – only to be expected at such an event – and a bit of bother with some skinheads at one of the fences.

  At about half past nine, Chadwick reached for the next file, and he had just opened it when Karen popped her head around his door and told him Detective Chief Superintendent McCullen wanted to see him. Chadwick put the folder back on the pile. If McCullen wanted to see him, it had to be something pretty big. Whatever it was, it was bound to be a lot more interesting than paperwork.

  McCullen sat in his spacious office puffing on his pipe and enjoying the panoramic view. Brotherton House perched at the western edge of the city center, adjacent to the university and Leeds General Infirmary buildings, and it looked out west over the new Inner Ringroad toward Park Lane College. All the old mills and factories in the area, blackened by a century or more of soot, had been demolished over the last two or three years, and it seemed that a whole new city was rising from the ruins of its Victorian past: the International Swimming Pool, Leeds Playhouse, Leeds Polytechnic, the Yorkshire Post Building. Cranes crisscrossed on the horizon and the sound of pneumatic drills filled the air. Was it just Chadwick’s imagination, or was there a building site no matter whe
re you looked in the city these days?

  He wasn’t sure that the future was better than the past it was replacing any more than he was sure the emerging world order was better than the old one. There seemed a monotonous sterility to many of the new buildings, concrete-and-glass tower blocks for the most part, along with terraces of redbrick council houses. Their Victorian predecessors, like Benjamin Gott’s Bean Ing Mills, might have looked a bit more grimy and shabby, but at least they had character. Or perhaps, Chadwick thought, he was just becoming an old fogy about architecture, the same way he was about young people. And at forty-eight, he was too young for that. He made a mental note to try to be more tolerant of hippies and architects.

  “Stan, sit down,” said McCullen, gesturing to the seat opposite his desk. He was a hard, compact man, one of the old school, and fast nearing retirement. Gray hair in a severe crew cut, sharp, square features, an intimidating gleam in his narrowed eyes. People said he had no sense of humor, but Chadwick thought it was just so dark and buried so deep that nobody could recognize it, or wanted to find it. McCullen had served as a commando during the war, and Chadwick had seen more than enough active duty himself. He liked to think it created a bond between them, something in common that they never spoke about. They also shared a Scottish background. Chadwick’s mother was a Scot, and his father had worked in the Clydebank shipyards. Chadwick had grown up in Glasgow, drifting down to Yorkshire only after the war.

  Chadwick sat.

  “I won’t beat about the bush,” McCullen began, knocking his pipe on the heavy glass ashtray, “but there’s been a body discovered at Brimleigh Glen, the big field where they held the festival this weekend. I don’t have many details yet. The report has just this minute come in. All we know is that the victim is a young woman.”

  “Oh,” said Chadwick, aware of that cold sinking feeling deep in his belly. “I thought Brimleigh was the North Riding?”

  McCullen refilled his pipe. “Strictly speaking, it is,” he said finally, releasing clouds of aromatic blue smoke. “Just over the border. But they’re country coppers. They don’t get many murders, just a bit of sheep-shagging now and then. They’ve certainly got no one capable of handling an investigation of this magnitude, given how many people must have been attending that festival, and they’re asking for our help. I thought, perhaps, with your recent successes…”

  “The locals still won’t like it,” Chadwick said. “Perhaps it’s not as bad as having Scotland Yard tramping all over your provincial toes, but-”

  “It’s already cleared,” said McCullen, turning his gaze back to the window. “There’s a local detective sergeant, name of Keith Enderby. You’ll be working with him. He’s already at the scene.” McCullen glanced at his wristwatch. “Better get out there, Stan. DC Bradley’s waiting with the car. The doc’ll be there soon wanting to get the body back to the mortuary for the postmortem.”

  Chadwick knew when he was being dismissed. Solve two murders so far this year and you get lumbered with a case like this. Bloody hippies. Paperwork suddenly didn’t look so bad, after all. Tolerance, he told himself. He stood up and headed for the door.

  Monday, 8th September, 1969

  There was no easy access to the body in the field, not without getting his shoes muddy. Chadwick cursed under his breath as he saw his lovingly polished black brogues and the bottoms of his suit trousers daubed with brown mud. If he’d been a rural copper, he’d have kept a pair of wellies in the boot of his car, but you don’t expect mud when you’re used to working the streets of Leeds. If anything, DC Bradley complained even more.

  Brimleigh Glen looked like a vast tip. A natural amphitheater cupped between low hills to the east and north and Brimleigh Woods to the west and south, it was a popular spot for picnics and brass band concerts in summer. Not this weekend, though. A stage had been erected at the western end of the field, abutting the woods, and the audience had sprawled as far back as the hillsides on the eastern and northern sides, to a distance where, Chadwick guessed, nobody would have been able to see very much at all except little dots.

  The small knot of people surrounding the body stood at the southern edge of the field, about a hundred yards back from the stage, near the edge of the woods. When Chadwick and Bradley arrived, a man with long greasy hair, bell-bottom jeans and an Afghan waistcoat turned and said with far more aggression than Chadwick would have expected of someone who was supposed to embrace peace and love, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Chadwick feigned a surprised expression and looked around, then he pointed his thumb at his own chest. “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  A clearly embarrassed young man hurried over to them. “Er… I think that’s probably the detective inspector from Leeds. Am I right, sir?”

  Chadwick nodded.

  “How d’you do, sir? I’m Detective Sergeant Enderby, North Yorkshire Constabulary. This is Rick Hayes, the festival promoter.”

  “You must have been up all night,” said Chadwick. “I’d have thought you’d be long tucked up in bed by now.”

  “There’s still a lot to see to,” Hayes said, gesturing behind him. “That scaffolding, for a start. It’s rented and it all has to be accounted for. I’m sorry, by the way.” He glanced in the direction of the sleeping bag. “This has all been very upsetting.”

  “I’m sure,” said Chadwick, making his way forward. There were four people besides himself and DC Bradley at the scene, only one of them a uniformed policeman, and most of them were standing far too close to the body. They were also very casually dressed. Even DS Enderby’s hair, Chadwick noticed, was dangerously close to touching the collar of his jacket, and his sideboards needed trimming. His black winkle-pickers looked as if they had been dirty even before he crossed the field. “Were you the first officer to arrive at the scene?” Chadwick asked the young police constable, trying to move people back and clear a little space around the sleeping bag.

  “Yes, sir. PC Jacobs. I was on patrol when the call came in.”

  “Who called it in?”

  One of the others stepped forward. “I did. Steve Naylor. I was working on the scaffolding when Dave here shouted me over. There’s a phone box on the road on the other side of the hill.”

  “Did you find the body?” Chadwick asked Dave Sampson.

  “Yes.”

  Sampson looked pale, as well he might, Chadwick thought. His own war service and eighteen years on the force had hardened him to the sight of violent death, but he hadn’t forgotten his first time, and he never forgot how devastating it could appear to someone who had never witnessed it before. He looked around. “Any chance someone might rustle up a pot of tea?”

  Everyone stared at him, dumbfounded, then Naylor, the stage worker, said, “We’ve got a Primus and a billycan back there. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good lad.”

  Naylor headed for the stage.

  Chadwick turned back to Sampson. “Touch anything?” he asked.

  “Only the zip. I mean, I didn’t know… I thought…”

  “What did you think?”

  “It felt like there was someone inside. I thought they might be asleep or…”

  “On drugs?”

  “Possibly. Yes.”

  “After you opened the zip and saw what it was, what did you do then?”

  “I called over to the stage.”

  Chadwick looked at the speckled mess on the grass about a yard away. “Before or after you were sick?”

  Sampson swallowed. “After.”

  “Did you touch the body at all?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Now go over and give your statement to Detective Sergeant Enderby. We’ll probably want to talk to you again, so stick around.”

  Sampson nodded.

  Chadwick crouched by the blue sleeping bag, keeping his hands in his pockets so that he didn’t touch anything, even by accident. Only the upper half of the girl’s body was exposed, but it was enough. She was wearing a smoc
ked white dress with a scooped neck, and the area under the left breast was a mess – knife work, by the looks of it. Also, her dress was bunched up around her waist, as if she hadn’t had time to smooth it down when she got into the bag – or as if someone had shoved her in quickly after he’d killed her. The long dress could also have been raised for sexual purposes, if she had been sharing the sleeping bag with her boyfriend, Chadwick realized, but he would have to wait for the pathologist to find out any more about that.

  She was a very pretty girl, with long blond hair, an oval face and full lips. She looked so innocent. Not unlike Yvonne, he thought, with a sudden shudder, and Yvonne had been out all last night, too. But she had come home. Not this girl. She was perhaps a year or two older than Yvonne, and her eye shadow emphasized the color of her big blue eyes. The mascara stood out in stark contrast to the paleness of her skin. She wore several strings of cheap colored beads around her neck, and she had a cornflower painted on her right cheek.

  There was nothing more Chadwick could do until the Home Office pathologist arrived, which should be very soon, McCullen had given him to understand. Standing, he scanned the ground nearby but saw only rubbish: KitKat wrappers, a soggy International Times, an empty pouch of Old Holborn rolling tobacco, an orange pack of Rizla cigarette papers. It would all have to be bagged and checked out, of course. He sniffed the air – moist but warm enough for the time of year – and glanced at his watch. Half past eleven. It looked like being another fine day, and a long one.

  He turned his gaze back to the others. “Anybody recognize her?”

  They all shook their heads. Chadwick thought he noticed a little hesitation in Rick Hayes’s reaction.

  “Mr. Hayes?”