Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

“No,” said Hayes. “Never seen her before.”

  Chadwick thought he was lying about not recognizing the girl, but it would keep. He noticed a movement by the stage and looked to see Naylor coming back with a tray and, following shortly behind him, a nattily dressed man who seemed to be about as happy to find himself walking across a muddy field as Chadwick had been. But this man was carrying a black bag. The pathologist had arrived at last.

  October 2005

  Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks hit the play button, and after the heartbeats, the glorious sound of “Breathe” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon filled the room. He still hadn’t got the hang of the new equipment yet, but he was finding his way around it slowly. He had inherited a state-of-the-art sound system along with a DVD player, 42-inch plasma TV, 40G iPod and a Porsche 911 from his brother Roy. The estate had gone to Banks’s parents, but they were set in their ways and had no use for a Porsche or a large-screen TV. The first wouldn’t last five minutes parked outside their Peterborough council house, and the second wouldn’t fit in their living room. They had sold Roy’s London house, setting them both up nicely for the rest of their lives, and passed on the things they couldn’t use to Banks.

  As for Roy’s iPod, Banks’s father had taken one look at it and been about to drop it in the waste bin before Banks rescued it. Now it had become as essential to him, when he went out, as his wallet and his mobile. He had been able to download the software and buy new chargers and cables, along with an adapter that allowed him to play it through his car radio, and while he had kept a great deal of his brother’s music library on it, he had managed to clear a good fifteen hours’ worth of space by deleting the complete Ring cycle, and that was far more than enough to accommodate his meager collection at the moment.

  Banks headed into the kitchen to see how dinner was getting along. All he’d had to do was remove the packaging and put the foil tray in the oven, but he didn’t want to burn it. It was Friday evening, and Annie Cabbot was coming over for dinner tonight – just as a friend – and the evening was to be a sort of unofficial housewarming, though that was a term Banks hesitated to use these days. He had been back in the restored cottage for less than a month, and tonight would be Annie’s first visit.

  It was a wild October night outside. Banks could hear the wind screaming and moaning and see the dark shadows of tree branches tossing and thrashing beyond the kitchen window. He hoped Annie would make the drive all right, that there were no trees down. There was a spare bed if she wanted to stay, but he doubted that she would. Too much history for that to be comfortable for either of them, although there had been moments over the summer when he had thought it wouldn’t take much to brush all the objections aside. Best not think about that, he told himself.

  Banks poured himself the last of the Amarone. His parents had inherited Roy’s wine cellar, and they had passed this on to him, too. As far as Arthur Banks was concerned, white wine was for sissies and red wine tasted like vinegar. His mother preferred sweet sherry. Their loss was Banks’s gain, and while it lasted, he got to enjoy the high life of first-growth Bordeaux and Sauternes, white and red Burgundy from major growers, Chianti Classico, Barolo and Amarone. When it was gone, of course, he would be back to boxes of Simply Chilean and Big Aussie Red, but for the moment he was enjoying himself.

  Whenever he opened a bottle, though, he missed Roy, which was strange because they had never been close, and Banks felt he had only got to know his brother after his death. He would just have to learn to live with it. It was the same with the other things – the TV, stereo, car, music – they all made him think of the brother he had never really known.

  Part of the way through “Us and Them” he heard the doorbell ring. Annie, half past seven, right on time. He walked through and opened the front door, flinching at the gust of wind that almost blew her into his arms. She edged back, giggling, trying to hold down her hair as Banks pushed the door shut, but even in the short trip from her car to his front door it had become a tangled mess.

  “Quite the night out there,” Banks said. “I hope you didn’t have any problems getting here.”

  Annie smiled. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She handed Banks a bottle of wine – Tesco’s Chilean Merlot, he noticed – and took out a hairbrush. As she attacked her hair, she wandered around the front room. “This is certainly different from what I expected,” she said. “It looks really cozy. I see you did go for the dark wood, after all.”

  The wood for the desk had been one of the things they had talked about, and Annie had advised the darker color, as opposed to light pine. What had been Banks’s main living room was now a small study complete with bookcases, a reproduction Georgian writing table for the laptop computer under the window, and a couple of comfortable brown leather armchairs arranged around the fire, perfect for reading. A door by the side of the fireplace led into the new entertainment room, which ran the length of the house. Annie walked up and down and admired it, though she did tell Banks she thought it was a bit of a bloke’s den.

  The TV hung on the wall at the front and the speakers were spread about in strategic positions around the deep plum sofa and armchairs. Storage racks on the side walls held CDs and DVDs, mostly Roy’s, apart from the few Banks had bought over the past couple of months. At the back, French windows led to the new conservatory.

  They wandered into the kitchen, which had been completely remodeled. Banks had tried to make sure it was as close to the original as possible, with the pine cupboards, copper-bottomed pans on wall hooks and the breakfast nook, where bench and table matched the cupboards, but that strange benign presence he had felt there before had gone for good, or so it seemed. Now it was a fine kitchen, but only a kitchen. The builders had run the conservatory along the entire back of the house, and there was also a door leading to it from the kitchen.

  “Impressive,” Annie said. “All this and a Porsche parked outside, too. You’ll be pulling the birds like nobody’s business.”

  “Some hope,” said Banks. “I might even sell the Porsche.”

  “Why?”

  “It just feels so strange, having all Roy’s stuff. I mean, the TV and the movies and CDs are okay, I suppose, not quite as personal, but the car… I don’t know. Roy loved that car.”

  “Give it a chance. You might get to love it, too.”

  “I like it well enough. It’s just… oh, never mind.”

  “Mmm, it smells good in here. What’s for dinner?”

  “Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  Annie gave him a look.

  “Vegetarian lasagna,” he said. “Marks and Spencer’s best.”

  “That’ll do fine.”

  Banks threw a simple salad together with an oil-and-vinegar dressing while Annie sat on the bench and opened the wine. Pink Floyd finished, so he went and put some Mozart wind quintets on the stereo. He’d had speakers wired into the kitchen, and the sound was good. When everything was ready, they sat opposite one another and Banks served the food. Annie was looking good, he thought. Her flowing chestnut hair still fell about her shoulders in disarray, but that only heightened her attraction for him. As for the rest, she was dressed in her usual casual style – just a touch of makeup, lightweight linen jacket, a green T-shirt and close-fitting black jeans, bead necklace, and several thin silver bracelets which jingled when she moved her hand.

  They had hardly got beyond the first mouthful when Banks’s telephone rang. He muttered an apology to Annie and went to answer it.

  “Sir?”

  It was DC Winsome Jackman. “Yes, Winsome,” Banks said. “This had better be important. I’ve been slaving over a hot oven all day.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “There’s been a murder, sir.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I wouldn’t be disturbing you if I wasn’t, sir,” Winsome said. “I’m at the scene right now. Moorview Cottage in Fordham, just outside Lyndgarth. I’m standing abo
ut six feet away from him, and the back of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone bashed him with the poker. Kev’s here, too, and he agrees. Sorry, Detective Sergeant Templeton. The local bobby called it in.”

  Banks knew Fordham. It was nothing but a hamlet, really, a cluster of cottages, a pub and a church. “Christ,” he said. “Okay, Winsome, I’ll get there as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can call in the SOCOs and Dr. Glendenning, if he’s available.”

  “Right you are, sir. Should I ring DI Cabbot?”

  “I’ll deal with that. Keep the scene clear. We’ll be there. Half an hour at the most.”

  Banks hung up and went back into the kitchen. “Sorry to spoil your dinner, Annie, but we’ve got to go out. Suspicious death. Winsome’s certain it’s murder.”

  “Your car or mine?”

  “Yours, I think. The Porsche is a bit pretentious for a crime scene, don’t you think?”

  Monday, 8th September, 1969

  As the day progressed, the scene around Brimleigh Glen became busy with the arrival of various medical and scientific experts and the incident van, a temporary operational headquarters with telephone communications and, more important, tea-making facilities. The immediate crime scene was taped off and a constable posted at the entrance to log the names of those who came and went. All work on rubbish disposal, stage dismantling and cesspit filling was suspended until further notice, much to the chagrin of Rick Hayes, who complained that every minute more spent at the field was costing him money.

  Chadwick hadn’t forgotten Hayes’s possible lie earlier about not recognizing the victim, and he looked forward to the pleasure of a more in-depth interview. In fact, Hayes was high on his list of priorities. For the moment, though, it was important to get the investigation organized, get the mechanics in place and the right men appointed to the right jobs.

  Detective Sergeant Enderby seemed capable enough on first impression, despite the length of his hair, and Chadwick already knew that Simon Bradley, his driver, was a bright young copper with a good future ahead of him. He also demonstrated the same sort of military neatness and precision in his demeanor that Chadwick appreciated. As for the rest of the team, they would come mostly from the North Riding, people he didn’t know, and he would have to learn their strengths and weaknesses on the hoof. He preferred to enter into an investigation on more certain ground, but it couldn’t be helped. Officially, this was North Yorkshire’s case, and he was simply helping out.

  The doctor had pronounced the victim dead and turned the body over to the coroner’s officer, in this case a local constable specially appointed to the task, who arranged for its transportation to the mortuary in Leeds. During his brief examination at the scene, Dr. O’Neill had been able to tell Chadwick only that the wounds almost certainly had been caused by a thin bladed knife and that she had been dead less than ten hours and more than six before the time of his examination, which meant she had been killed sometime between half past one and half past five in the morning. Her body had been moved after death, he added, and she had not been in the sleeping bag when she died. Though stab wounds, even to the heart, often don’t bleed a great deal, the doctor said, he would have expected more blood on the inside of the sleeping bag had she been stabbed there.

  How long she had lain elsewhere before she had been moved, or where she had lain, he couldn’t say, only that the postmortem lividity indicated that she had been on her back for some hours. From an external examination, it didn’t look as if she had been raped – she was still, in fact, wearing her white cotton knickers, and they looked clean – but only a complete postmortem would reveal details of any sexual activity prior to death. There were no defensive wounds on her hands, which most likely meant that she had been taken by surprise, and that the first stab had pierced her heart and incapacitated her immediately. There was light bruising on the front left side of her neck, which Dr. O’Neill said could be an indication that someone, the killer probably, had restrained her from behind.

  So, Chadwick thought, the killer had made a clumsy attempt to make it look as if the girl had been killed in the bag on the field, and clumsy attempts to mislead often yield clues. Before doing anything else, Chadwick commissioned Enderby to get a team with a police dog together to comb Brimleigh Woods.

  The photographer did his stuff and the specialists searched the scene, then bagged everything for scientific analysis. They got some partial footprints, but there was no guarantee that any of these were the killer’s. Even so, they patiently made plaster-of-Paris casts. There was no weapon in the immediate vicinity, hardly surprising as the victim hadn’t died there, nor was there anything in the sleeping bag or near her body to indicate who she was. Lack of drag marks indicated that she might have been moved there before it rained. The beads she wore were common enough, although Chadwick imagined it might be possible to track down a supplier.

  Some poor mother and father would no doubt be wringing their hands with worry about now, as he had been wringing his about Yvonne. Had she been at the festival? he wondered. It would be just like her – the kind of music she listened to, her rebellious spirit, the clothes she wore. He remembered the fuss she had made when he and Janet wouldn’t let her go to the Isle of Wight Festival the weekend before. The Isle of Wight, for crying out loud. It was three hundred miles away. Anything could happen. What on earth had she been thinking about?

  For the time being, the best course of action was to check all missing persons reports for someone matching the victim’s description. Failing any luck there, they would have to get a decent enough photograph of her to put in the papers and show on television, along with a plea for information from anyone in the crowd who might have seen or heard anything. However they did it, they needed to know who she was as soon as possible. Only then could they attempt to fathom out who had done this to her, and why.

  The darkness deepened the closer Banks and Annie got to Lyndgarth. It looked as if the wind had taken down an electricity cable somewhere and caused a power cut. The silhouettes of branches jerked in the beam of the car’s headlights, while all around was darkness, not even the light of a distant farmhouse to guide them. In Lyndgarth, houses, pubs, church and village green were all in the dark. Annie drove slowly as the road curved out of town, over the narrow stone bridge and around the bend another half a mile or so to Fordham. Even in the surrounding darkness it was easy to see where all the fuss was as they came over the second bridge shortly after half past eight.

  The main road veered sharp left at the pub, opposite the church, toward Eastvale, but straight ahead, on a rough track that continued up the hill past the youth hostel and over the wild moorland, a police patrol car blocked the way, along with Winsome’s unmarked Vectra. Annie pulled up behind the cars, and wind whipped at her clothes as she got out of the car. The trouble was in the last cottage on the left. Opposite Moorview Cottage, a narrow lane ran west between the side of the church and a row of cottages until it was swallowed up in the dark countryside.

  “Not much of a place, is it?” said Banks.

  “Depends on what you want,” said Annie. “It’s quiet enough, I suppose.”

  “And there is a pub.” Looking back across the main road, Banks fancied he could see the glow of candlelight through the windows and hear the muffled tones of conversation from inside. A little thing like a power cut clearly wasn’t going to deprive the locals of their hand-pumped ale.

  The light of a torch dazzled them, and Banks heard Winsome’s voice. “Sir? DI Cabbot? This way. I took the liberty of asking the SOCOs to bring some lighting with them, but for the moment this is all we’ve got.”

  They followed the trail the torch lit up through a high wooden gate and a conservatory. The local PC was waiting inside the door, talking to newly promoted Detective Sergeant Kevin Templeton, and the light from his torch improved visibility quite a bit. Even so, they were limited to what they could see within the beams; the rest of the place was shrouded in darkness.

  Treading
carefully across the stone flags, Banks and Annie followed the lights to the edge of the living room. They weren’t wearing protective clothing, so they had to keep their distance until the experts had finished. There, sprawled on the floor near the fireplace, lay the body of a man. He was lying on his face, so Banks couldn’t tell how old he was, but his clothing – jeans and a dark green sweatshirt – suggested he was youngish. And Winsome was right; there was no doubt about this one. He could see even from a few feet away that the back of his head was a bloody mess and a long trail of dark coagulating blood gleamed in the torchlight, ending in a puddle that was soaking into the rug. Winsome moved her torch beam around and Banks could see a poker lying on the floor not far from the victim, and a pair of glasses with one lens broken.

  “Do you notice any signs of a struggle?” Banks asked.

  “No,” said Annie.

  The beam picked out a packet of Dunhills and a cheap disposable lighter on the table beside the armchair, toward which the victim’s head was pointing. “Say he was going for his cigarettes,” Banks said.

  “And someone took him by surprise?”

  “Yes. But someone he had no reason to think would kill him.” Banks pointed to the rack by the fireplace. “The poker would most likely have been there on the hearth with the other implements.”

  “Blood-spatter analysis should give us a better idea of how it happened,” Annie said.

  Banks nodded and turned to Winsome. “First thing we do is seal off this room completely,” he said. “It’s out of bounds to anyone who doesn’t need to be in it.”

  “Right, sir,” said Winsome.

  “And organize a house-to-house as soon as possible. Ask for reinforcements, if necessary.”

  “Sir.”

  “Do we know who he is?”

  “We don’t know anything yet,” Winsome said. “PC Travers here lives down the road and tells me he doesn’t know him. Apparently it’s a holiday cottage.”