Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  To a chorus of muttered “Yes, ma’ams” she left the room, heels clicking against the hardwood floor. Only after she’d gone did Banks realize that he had forgotten to tell her about the figures in the book.

  Monday, 8th September, 1969

  Janet was watching The News at Ten when Chadwick got home that evening, and Reginald Bosanquet was talking about ITA’s exciting new UHF color transmissions from the Crystal Palace transmitter, which was all very well, Chadwick thought, if you happened to own a color TV. He didn’t. Not on a DI’s pay of a little over two thousand pounds per year. Janet walked toward him.

  “Hard day?” she asked.

  Chadwick nodded, kissed her and sat down in his favorite armchair.

  “Drink?”

  “A small whiskey would go down nicely. Yvonne not home yet?” He glanced at the clock. Twenty past ten.

  “Not yet.”

  “Know where she is?”

  Janet turned from pouring the whiskey. “Out with friends was all she said.”

  “She shouldn’t go out so often on school nights. She knows that.”

  Janet handed him the drink. “She’s sixteen. We can’t expect her to do everything the way we’d like it. Things are different these days. Teenagers have a lot more freedom.”

  “Freedom? As long as she’s under this roof we’ve a right to expect some degree of honesty and respect from her, haven’t we?” Chadwick argued. “The next thing you know she’ll be dropping out and running off to live in a hippie commune. Freedom.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Stan. She’s going through a stage, that’s all.” Janet softened her tone. “She’ll get over it. Weren’t you just a little bit rebellious when you were sixteen?”

  Chadwick tried to remember. He didn’t think so. It was 1937 when he was sixteen, before “teenagers” had been invented, when youth was simply an unfortunate period one had to pass through on the route from childhood to maturity. Another world. George VI was crowned king that year, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister and looked likely to get along well with Hitler, and the Spanish Civil War was at its bloodiest. But Chadwick had paid only scant attention to world affairs. He was at grammar school then, on a scholarship, playing rugby with the first fifteen, and all set for a university career that was interrupted by the war and somehow never got resurrected.

  He had volunteered for the Green Howards in 1940 because his father had served with them in the First World War, and spent the next five years killing first Japanese, then Germans, while trying to stay alive himself. After it was all over and he was back on civvy street in his demob suit, it took him six years to get over it. Six years of dead-end jobs, bouts of depression, loneliness and hunger. He nearly died of cold in the bitter winter of 1947. Then it was as if the weight suddenly lifted, and the lights came on. He joined the West Riding Constabulary in 1951. The following year he met Janet at a dance. They were married only three months later, and a year after that, in March 1953, Yvonne was born.

  Rebellious? He didn’t think so. It seemed to be a young person’s lot in life to go off to war back then, just like the generation before him, and in the army you obeyed orders. He’d got into minor mischief like all the other kids, smoking before he was old enough, the odd bit of shoplifting, sneaking drinks from his father’s whiskey bottle, replacing what he’d drunk with water. He also got into the occasional scrap. But one thing he didn’t dare do was disobey his parents. If he had stayed out all night without permission, his father would have beaten him black and blue.

  Chadwick grunted. He didn’t suppose Janet really wanted an answer; she was just trying to ease the way for Yvonne’s arrival home, which he hoped would be soon.

  The news finished at ten forty-five and the late-night “X” film came on. Normally Chadwick wouldn’t bother watching such rubbish, but this week it was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which he and Janet had seen at the Lyric about eight years ago, and he didn’t mind watching it again. At least it was the sort of life he could understand, real life, not long-haired kids listening to loud music and taking drugs.

  It was about quarter past eleven when he heard the front door open and shut. By that time, his anger had edged over into concern, but in a parent the two are often so intermingled as to be indistinguishable.

  “Where have you been?” he asked Yvonne when she walked into the living room in her pale blue bell-bottomed jeans and red cheesecloth top with white-and-blue embroidery down the gathered front. Her eyes looked a little bleary, but other than that she seemed all right.

  “That’s a nice welcome,” she said.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  “If you must know, I’ve been to the Grove.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down past the station, by the canal.”

  “And what goes on there?”

  “Nothing goes on. It’s folk night on Mondays. People sing folk songs and read poetry.”

  “You know you’re not old enough to drink.”

  “I wasn’t drinking. Not alcohol, anyway.”

  “You smell of smoke.”

  “It’s a pub, Dad. People were smoking. Look, if all you’re going to do is go on at me like this, I’m off to bed. It’s a school day tomorrow, or didn’t you know?”

  “Enough of your cheek! You’re too young to be hanging around pubs in town. God knows who-”

  “If it was up to you I wouldn’t have any friends at all, would I? And I’d never go anywhere. You make me sick!”

  And with that Yvonne stomped upstairs to her room.

  Chadwick made to follow her, but Janet grabbed his arm. “No, Stan. Not now. Let’s not have another flaming row. Not tonight.”

  Furious as he felt, Chadwick realized she was right. Besides, he was exhausted. Not the best time to get into a long argument with his daughter. But he’d have it out with her tomorrow. Find out what she was up to, where she had been all Sunday night, exactly what crowd she was hanging around with. Even if he had to follow her.

  He could hear her banging about upstairs, using the toilet and the bathroom, slamming her bedroom door, making a point of it. It was impossible to get back into the film now. Impossible to go to sleep, too, no matter how tired he felt. If he’d had a dog he would have taken it for a walk. Instead he poured himself another small whiskey, and while Janet pretended to read her Woman’s Weekly he pretended to watch Saturday Night and Sunday Morning until all was silent upstairs and it was safe to go to bed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Annie took a chance that Kelly Soames would be turning up for work on Saturday morning, so she parked behind the incident van in Fordham and adjusted her rearview mirror so that she could see the pub and the road behind her. Banks had told her he thought Kelly didn’t want to talk last night because there were people around and she might have a personal secret; therefore, it would be a good idea to get her alone, take her somewhere. He also thought a woman might have more chance of getting whatever it was out of her, hence Annie.

  Just before eleven o’clock, Annie saw Kelly get out of a car. She recognized the driver; he was one of the men who had been in the pub the previous evening, one of the cardplayers. As soon as he had driven off and turned the bend, Annie backed up and intercepted Kelly. “A word with you, please,” she said.

  Kelly made toward the pub door. “I can’t. I’ll be late for work.”

  Annie opened her passenger door. “You’ll be a lot later if you don’t come with me now.”

  Kelly chewed her lip, then muttered something under her breath and got in the old purple Astra. It was long past time for a new car, Annie realized, but she’d had neither the time nor the money lately. Banks had offered her his Renault when he got the Porsche, but she had declined. It wasn’t her kind of car, for a start, and there was something rather shabby in her mind about taking Banks’s castoffs. She’d buy something new soon, but for now, the Astra still got her where she wanted to go.

  Annie set off up the hill, past the youth h
ostel, where a couple of uniforms were still making inquiries, on to the wild moorland beyond. She pulled over into a lay-by next to a stile. It was the start of a walk to an old lead mine, Annie knew, as Banks had taken her there to show her where someone had once found a body in the flue. That morning, there was no one around and the wind raged, whistling around the car, plucking at the purple heather and rough sere grass. Kelly took a packet of Embassy Regals out of her handbag, but Annie pushed her hand down and said, “No. Not in here. I don’t like the smell of smoke, and I’m not opening the windows. It’s too cold.”

  Kelly put the cigarettes away and pouted.

  “Last night, when we were talking in the pub,” Annie said, “you reacted in a rather extreme way about what happened.”

  “Well, someone got killed. I mean, it might be normal for you, but not round here. It was a shock, that’s all.”

  “It seemed like a personal shock.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do I have to spell it out, Kelly?”

  “I’m not thick.”

  “Then stop playing games. What was your relationship with the deceased?”

  “I didn’t have a relationship. He came in the pub, that’s all. He had a nice smile, said have one for yourself. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough to be upset that he’s dead.”

  “Look, I’m sorry if this is hard for you,” Annie went on, “but we’re only doing this because we care, too.”

  Kelly shot her a glance. “You never even saw him when he was alive. You didn’t even know he existed.”

  True, it was one of the things about Annie’s job that she more often than not found herself investigating the deaths of strangers. But Banks had taught her that during the course of such investigations they don’t remain strangers. You get to know the dead, become their voice, in a way, because they can no longer speak for themselves. She couldn’t explain this to Kelly, though.

  “He’d been in the cottage a week,” said Annie, “and you’re telling me you only saw him when he came into the pub and said hello.”

  “So?”

  “You seem more upset than I think you would be if that was all.”

  Kelly folded her arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Annie turned to face her. “I think you do, Kelly.”

  They sat silently cocooned in the car, Kelly stiff, facing the front, Annie turned sideways in her seat, looking at her profile. A few spots of acne stood out on the girl’s right cheek and she had a little white scar at the outer edge of one eyebrow. Outside, the wind continued to rage through the moorland grass and to rock the car a little with unexpected gusts and buffets. The sky was a vast expanse of blue with small, high fast-moving white clouds casting brief shadows on the moor. It must have been three, maybe four minutes, an awful long time in that sort of situation, anyway, before Kelly started to shiver a little, and before long she was shaking like a leaf in Annie’s arms, tears streaming down her face. “You mustn’t tell my father,” she kept saying through the tears. “You mustn’t tell my father.”

  Tuesday, 9th September, 1969

  On Tuesday evening, Yvonne was in her room after teatime reading Mark Knopfler’s column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. He wrote about the music scene, as well as sometimes jamming with local bands at the Peel and the Guildford, and she thought he might have something to say about Brimleigh, but this week’s column was about a series of forthcoming concerts at the Harrogate Theatre – the Nice, the Who, Yes, Fairport Convention. It sounded great, if her father would let her go to Harrogate.

  She heard a knock at her door and was surprised to see her father standing there. Even more surprised to see that he didn’t appear angry with her. Her mother must have put in a good word for her. Even so, she braced herself for the worst: accusations, the cutting of pocket money and limitation of freedom, but they didn’t come. Instead, they came to a compromise. She would be allowed to go to the Grove on Mondays, but had to be home by eleven o’clock and must under no circumstances drink any alcohol. Then she had to stop in and do her homework every other school night. She could also go out Friday and Saturday. But not all night. He tried to get her to tell him where she’d been on Sunday, but all she’d said was she spent the night listening to music with friends and had lost track of the time. Somehow, she got the impression that he didn’t believe her, but instead of pushing it, he asked, “Have you got anything by Led Zeppelin?”

  “Led Zeppelin? Yes. Why?” They had only released one LP so far, and Yvonne had bought it with the record token her Aunt Moira had given her for her sixteenth birthday back in March. It said in Melody Maker that they had a new album coming out next month, and Robert Plant had mentioned it at Brimleigh, when they had played songs from it, like “Heartbreaker.” Yvonne could hardly wait. Robert Plant was so sexy.

  “Would you say they’re loud?”

  Yvonne laughed. “Pretty loud, yes.”

  “Mind if I give them a listen?”

  Still confused, Yvonne said, “No, not at all. Go ahead.” She picked it out of her pile and handed it to him, the LP with the big zeppelin touching the edge of the Eiffel Tower and bursting into flames.

  The Dansette record player that her father had got for five thousand Embassy coupons before he stopped smoking was downstairs, in the living room. It was a bone of contention, as Yvonne maintained that she was the only one who bought records and really cared about music, apart from the occasional Johnny Mathis and Jim Reeves her mother put on, and her father’s few big-band LPs. She thought it should be in her room, but her father insisted that it was the family record player.

  At least he had bought her, for her birthday, an extra speaker unit that you could plug in and create a real stereo effect, and she had the little transistor radio she kept on her bedside table, but she still had to wait until her parents were out before she could listen to her own records properly, at the right volume.

  She went down with him and turned it on. He didn’t even seem to know how to operate the thing, so Yvonne took over. Soon, “Good Times, Bad Times” was blasting out loudly enough to bring Janet dashing in from the kitchen to see what was going on.

  After listening to less than half of the song, Chadwick turned down the volume and asked, “Are they all like that?”

  “You’d probably think so,” Yvonne said, “but every song is different. Why?”

  “Nothing, really. Just something I was wondering about.” He rejected the LP and switched off the record player. “Thanks. You can have it back now.”

  Still puzzled, Yvonne put the LP back in its sleeve and went up to her room.

  Banks looked out of his office window. It was market day, and the wooden stalls spread out over the cobbled square, canvas covers flapping in the wind, selling everything from cheap shirts and flat caps to used books, bootleg CDs and DVDs. The monthly farmers’ market extended farther across the square, selling locally grown vegetables, Wensleydale and Swaledale cheese, and organic beef and pork. Banks thought all beef and pork – not to mention wine, fruit and vegetables – was organic, but someone had told him it really meant “organically raised,” without pesticides or chemicals. Why didn’t they say that, then? he wondered.

  Locals and tourists alike mingled and sampled the wares. When they had finished there, Banks knew, many of them would be moving on to the big car-boot sale at Catterick, where they would agonize over buying dodgy mobile phones for a couple of quid and dubious fifty-pee inkjet refills.

  It was half past twelve. Banks had spent the rest of the morning after the meeting going over the SOCO exhibits lists and talking with Stefan and Vic Manson about fingerprints and possible DNA samples from the bedding at Moorview Cottage. What they would prove he didn’t know, but he needed everything he could get. And these were probably the kind of “facts” over which Detective Superintendent Gervaise salivated. That wasn’t fair, he realized, especially as he had decided to give her th
e benefit of the doubt, but that remark about going to the pub had stung. He had felt like a schoolboy on the headmaster’s carpet again.

  Martha Argerich was playing a Beethoven piano concerto on Radio 3 in the background. It was a live recording, and in the quiet bits Banks could hear people in the audience coughing. He thought again about seeing Catherine Gervaise and her husband at Opera North. They had much better seats than he had, closer to the front. They’d have been able to see the sweat and spittle at close hand. Rumor had it that Superintendent Gervaise was after a commander’s job at Scotland Yard, but until something came up, they were stuck with her in Eastvale.

  Banks sat down and picked up the book again. It looked well-thumbed. He had never read any Ian McEwan, but the name was on his list. One day. He liked the opening well enough.

  The book gave no clue as to where it had been bought. Some secondhand bookshops, Banks knew, had little stamps on the inside cover with their name and address on, but not this one. He would check the local shops to see if the victim had bought it in Eastvale, where there were two possible suppliers, and a number of charity shops that sold used books.

  Nick hadn’t written his name on the inside, the way some people do. All it said was £3.50. There was a sticker on the back, and Banks realized it was from Border’s; he’d seen it before. There looked to be enough coded information on there to locate the branch, but he very much doubted that that would lead him to the actual customer who had bought it originally. And who knew how many people had owned it since then?

  Once again he turned to the neat penciled figures in the back:

  6, 8, 9, 21, 22, 25

  1, 2, 3, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23

  10, , 13

  8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30

  17, 18,