Piece Of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

  “I was just a kid,” said Annie, “but I do remember we had more than our fair share of freaks around. My dad always used to protect me from them, though. You’d be surprised in some ways how conservative my upbringing was. They went out of their way to instill ‘normal’ values in me. It was as if they didn’t want me to be too different, like them.”

  “They probably didn’t want you to be singled out and picked on at school.”

  “Ha! Then it didn’t help. The other kids still thought I was a freak. How did the Mad Hatters survive all this?”

  “Their manager, Chris Adams, pulled it all together. He brought a replacement in, fiddled with the band’s sound and image a bit and, wham, they were off.”

  “How did he change them?”

  “Instead of another keyboards player, he brought in a female vocalist. Their sound became a bit more commercial, more pop, without losing its sixties edge entirely. They just got rid of that juvenile psychedelia. That’s probably the way you remember them, the nice harmonies. Anyway, the rest is history. They conquered America, became a big stadium band, youth anthems and all that. By the time they released their fourth album in 1973, they were megastars. Not all their new fans were aware of their early roots, but then not everyone knows that Fleetwood Mac was a decent blues band before Stevie Nicks and ‘Rhiannon’ and all that crap.”

  “Hey, watch what you’re calling crap! I happen to like ‘Rhiannon.’”

  Banks smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have known.”

  “Snob.”

  “Anyway, that’s the Mad Hatters story. And you say the girlfriend-”

  “Melanie Wright.”

  “Melanie Wright said that Nick thought he’d got his teeth into a juicy story and that she felt it was somehow personal to him.”

  “Yes. And he mentioned murder. Don’t forget that.”

  “I haven’t,” said Banks. “Whose murder did he mean?”

  “At a guess, from what you’ve just told me, I’d say Robin Merchant’s, wouldn’t you?”

  Tuesday, 16th September, 1969

  “I want to apologize to you about that Mad Hatters LP,” Chadwick said to DS Enderby over a late breakfast in the canteen on Tuesday morning. Geoff Broome had come up with an address on Bayswater Terrace, Enderby had driven down from Brimleigh, and they were fortifying themselves with bacon and eggs before the visit.

  “It’s all right, sir,” said Enderby. “I got Pink Floyd to sign my copy of More last weekend. As a matter of fact, the Mad Hatters and even Floyd aren’t really my cup of tea. I’m actually more of a blues man myself.”

  “Blues?”

  “Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chicken Shack, John Mayall.”

  “Right,” said Chadwick, still no wiser. “Anyway, I am sorry. It was wrong of me.”

  “You were probably right, though, about not being seen accepting gifts.”

  “Well, I’d feel a bit better about saying that if I hadn’t gone and given it to my daughter.”

  “You did what, sir?”

  Chadwick looked away. “I gave it to my daughter. A few bridges to build, you know.”

  Enderby burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “What did she say?”

  “She seemed a bit shocked, but she was very grateful.”

  “I hope she enjoys it.”

  “She will. She likes them. And again… you know…”

  “Don’t worry about it, sir. Probably the best use for it. I’m only glad I didn’t get them to sign it to me.”

  “Look, Enderby, about these young people. You seem to take them in your stride, but they stick in my craw.”

  “I’d noticed that, sir. It’s just a matter of perspective.”

  “But I don’t understand them at all.”

  “They’re just kids, mostly, having a good time. Some of them are political, and that can become violent if they mix with the wrong types, and now that unscrupulous dealers have moved in on the drugs trade, that can be dangerous, too. A lot of them are confused by the world, and they’re looking for answers. Maybe we think they’re looking in all the wrong places, but they’re looking. What’s so wrong with wanting peace in the world?”

  “Nothing. But most of them come from decent homes, have parents who love them. Why on earth do they want to run off and live in filthy squats and squalid bedsits?”

  “You really don’t get it, do you, sir?”

  “That’s why I’m asking you, dammit.”

  “Freedom. You know yourself how parents often disapprove of what their kids do and prevent them from doing it. These kids don’t mind a bit of dirt and mess as long as they can come and go as they please.”

  “But what about the drugs, the sex?”

  “That’s what they want! I mean, they couldn’t smoke pot and have sex if they lived with their parents, could they?”

  Chadwick shook his head.

  “It’s more than that, though,” Enderby went on. “Especially in the north. A lot of kids, girls like Linda Lofthouse, for example, they see a pretty bleak future waiting for them. Marriage, babies, dirty nappies, washing, cooking, a life of drudgery, slavery even. It can look a lot like a prison, if you’ve got a bit of imagination and intelligence, as it seems she had. And for the blokes it’s not that much different. Same boring job at the factory, day in day out, down at the same old pub with your same old cronies night after night. Footie on Saturdays, telly most nights. If they catch a glimpse of something else, if they’ve got a bit about them, you can see how it might appeal. An escape, perhaps? Something new. Something different.”

  “But marriage and family are the cornerstones of our civilization.”

  “I know that, sir. I’m just trying to answer your question. Put myself in their shoes. Marriage and family are our traditional values. A lot of kids today argue against them, say that’s why the world’s in the trouble it’s in. War. Famine. Greed. And girls these days think there ought to be more for them in life. They want to work, for example, and get paid as much as men for doing the same job.”

  “They’ll be after our jobs before long.”

  “I wouldn’t be too surprised, sir.”

  “Freedom, eh?” said Chadwick. “Is that what it’s all about?”

  “I think so, sir. A lot of it, at any rate. Freedom to think what you want and do what you want. The rest is just trappings, icing on the cake.”

  “But what about responsibility? What about consequences?”

  “They’re young, sir. Indestructible and immortal. They don’t worry too much about those sorts of things.”

  “I thought freedom was what I was fighting for in the war.”

  “It was, sir. And we won.”

  “And this is the result?”

  Enderby shrugged.

  “All right,” said Chadwick. “I take your point. We’ll just have to live with it, then, won’t we? Another fried slice?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, sir.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tuesday, 16th September, 1969

  It was raining when Chadwick and Enderby paid their visit to Bayswater Terrace, and the rows of slate-roofed, redbrick houses looked suitably gloomy. DI Broome had found the number of the house they wanted easily enough. It wasn’t known as a drug house especially, though Broome had no doubt that drugs were consumed there, but the police had been looking for a dealer who had slipped through their net a few months ago, and they had visited all his possible known haunts, including this house, rented by a Dennis Nokes since early 1967. According to their information, the occupancy turnover was pretty high and included students, hippies and general layabouts. Nokes described himself as a student and a musician, but as far as anyone knew, he was on the dole.

  After the previous day’s exhausting session with the Mad Hatters, Chadwick wasn’t looking forward to the interview. He also hadn’t been certain when was the best time to call to find somebody home. In the end he decided it didn’t matter, so they went around lunchtime. Either thes
e people didn’t work or they were students, and the university term hadn’t started yet, so the odds were that someone would be there at almost any time of the day or night.

  Chadwick could hear the sound of a solo acoustic guitar coming from inside the house, which was encouraging. It stopped when Enderby knocked on the door, and they could hear someone shuffling down the hall. It turned out to be a young girl, surely no older than Yvonne, wearing only a long grubby white T-shirt with a target on the front, which hardly covered her bare thighs. The top did nothing much to hide her breasts, either, as she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Police,” Enderby said. They showed their warrant cards and introduced themselves.

  She didn’t looked scared or nervous, merely puzzled. “Police? Yeah. Right. Okay. Come in, then.” And she stood aside. When they were all inside the hall, she reached her arms in the air, pulling the T-shirt up even higher, and yawned. As he averted his gaze, Chadwick could see that Enderby made no effort to do likewise, that he was gazing with open admiration at her exposed thighs and pubic hair.

  “You woke me up,” the girl said. “I was having a nice dream.”

  “Who is it, Julie?” came a voice from upstairs, followed by a young man peering down from the landing, a guitar in his hand.

  “Police,” said Julie.

  “Okay, right, just a minute.” There was a short pause while the young man disappeared back into his room, then visited the toilet. Chadwick thought he could hear the sound of a few quids’ worth of marijuana flushing down the bowl. If he’d been drugs squad, the young lad wouldn’t have stood a chance. When he came down he was without his guitar. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Are you Dennis Nokes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d like to talk to you. Is there somewhere we can go?”

  Nokes gestured toward the rear. “Kitchen. Julie’s crashing in the front room. Go back to bed, Julie. It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

  Chadwick could just about make out a sleeping bag, or a pile of blankets, on the floor before the door closed.

  The kitchen was cleaner than Chadwick would have expected, but Janet would definitely have turned her nose up and gone at it with the Ajax and Domestos. The chairs were covered with some sort of red plastic material that had cracked and lined like parchment over time, and the table with a red-and-white-checked oilcloth, and on it lay a magazine called Oz with a photograph of a white man embracing a naked black man on the cover. Beside that stood an open jar of orange marmalade, rim encrusted with dried syrup, a half-wrapped slab of Lurpak butter and some bread crumbs. Nearby were a bottle of Camp coffee, salt and pepper shakers, a packet of Cocoa Krispies and a half-empty bottle of milk. Not to mention the overflowing ashtray, to which Dennis Nokes, by the looks of it, was soon to add.

  They sat down and Enderby took out his notebook and pen.

  “It’s only tobacco,” Nokes said as he rolled a cigarette. He had a tangle of curly dark hair and finely chiseled, almost pixieish, features, and he wore an open-necked blue shirt with jeans and sandals. A necklace of tiny different-colored beads hung around his neck, and a silver bracelet engraved with various occult symbols encircled his left wrist.

  “It had better be,” Chadwick said. “Pity you had to flush everything you had down the toilet when that’s not what I came about.”

  It only lasted a moment, but Chadwick noticed the look of annoyance that flashed across Nokes’s features before the practiced shrug. “I’ve got nothing to hide from the fuzz.”

  “While we’re talking,” said Chadwick, “let’s agree on a few ground rules. It’s not fuzz, or pigs, it’s DI Chadwick and DS Enderby. Okay?”

  “Whatever you want,” Nokes agreed, lighting the cigarette.

  “Right. I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way. Now let’s get to the real subject of our visit: Linda Lofthouse.”

  “Linda?”

  “Yes. I assume you’ve heard the news?”

  “Bummer, man,” said Nokes. “I was trying to write a song for her when you guys arrived. It’s okay, I mean, I’m not blaming you for interrupting me or anything. It wasn’t going very well.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Chadwick. “I don’t suppose you thought for a moment to come forward with information?”

  “Why, man? I haven’t seen Linda in a while.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Summer. July, I think. Same time Rick was up.”

  “Rick?”

  “Rick Hayes, man. He put on the festival.”

  “Was he with Linda Lofthouse in July?”

  “Not with her, just here at the same time.”

  “Did they know one another well?”

  “They’d met, I think. Linda’s cousin’s Vic Greaves, you know, the keyboard player in the Mad Hatters, and Rick promoted some of their gigs in London.”

  “Were they going out together?”

  “No way, man.” Nokes laughed. “Linda and Rick? You must be joking. She was way out of his league.”

  “I thought he made plenty of money from the concerts.”

  “It’s not about money, man. Is that all you people ever think of?”

  “So what was it about?”

  “It was a spiritual thing. Linda was an old soul. Spiritually she was lifetimes ahead of Rick.”

  “I see,” said Chadwick. “But they were here at the same time?”

  “Yes. That time. Linda crashed here but Rick was staying in some hotel in town. Didn’t stop him trying to pick up some bird to take back with him, but he ended up going alone.”

  “Why was he here?”

  “I used to know him a few years ago, when I lived in London. We’re sort of old mates, I suppose. Anyway, he’d come up to check out something at Brimleigh Glen for the festival, so he dropped by to see me.”

  Chadwick filed all that information away for his next talk with Rick Hayes, who was proving to be even more of a liar than he had at first appeared to be. “You say Linda hasn’t been here since July?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you seen her since then?”

  “No.”

  “Were you at Brimleigh?”

  “Of course. Rick scored us some free tickets.”

  “Did you see her there?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you between one and one-twenty on Sunday night?”

  “How do you expect me to remember that?”

  “Led Zeppelin had just started, if that refreshes your memory.”

  “Yeah, right. I sat through the whole set in the same place. We were in the middle, quite near the front. We got there early on Friday and staked out a good space.”

  “Who was with you?”

  Nokes nodded toward the front room. “Julie there, and the others from the house. There were five of us in all.”

  “I’ll need names.”

  “Sure. There was me, Julie, Martin, Rob and Cathy.”

  “Full names, please, sir,” DS Enderby interrupted. Nokes gave him a pitying look and told him.

  “Are any of the others at home now?” Chadwick asked.

  “Only Julie.”

  “We’ll send someone over later to take statements. Now about Linda. Did she stay here around the time of the festival?”

  “No. She knows she’s welcome here anytime she wants, man. She doesn’t have to ask, just turn up. But I don’t know where she was staying. Maybe in a tent or out on the field or something. Maybe she was with someone. Maybe they had a car. I don’t know, man. All I know is this is freaking me out.”

  “Stay calm, Mr. Nokes. Try a few deep breaths. I hear it works wonders.”

  Nokes glared at him. “You’re taking the piss.”

  “Not at all.”

  “This is very upsetting.”

  “What? That Linda was murdered or that you’re being questioned?”

  Nokes ran the end of his index finger over some grains of salt on the tablecloth. “All of it, m
an. It’s just so heavy. You’re laying a real trip on us, and you’re way off course. We’re into making love, not killing.”

  His whiny voice was starting to grate on Chadwick. “Tell me about Linda.”

  “What about her?”

  “When did you first meet?”

  “Couple of years ago. Not long after I moved here, May, June 1967, around then.”

  “And you came up from London?”

  “Yeah. I was living down there until early ’67. I’d seen the sort of stuff that was happening, and thought I could make some of it happen up here. Those were really exciting times – great music, poetry readings, light shows, happenings. Revolution was in the air, man.”

  “Back to Linda. How did you meet?”

  “In town, in a record shop. We were both looking through the folk section, and we just got talking. She was so alone. I mean, she was changing, but she didn’t know it, trying to find herself, didn’t know how to go about it. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Know what I mean?”

  “So you helped her to find herself?”

  “I invited her around here from time to time. I gave her a few books – Leary, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts. Played music for her. We talked a lot.”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “No way. She was six months pregnant.”

  “Drugs.”

  “Of course not.”

  “How long did she stay here?”

  “Not very long. After she’d had the baby she came here for a while, maybe a month or two the winter of ’67, then she went to London early in ’68. After that she’d crash here when she was up visiting.”

  “What did she do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Work? Earn a living? Did she have a job?”

  “Oh, that shit. Well, she didn’t when I first met her, of course. She was still living with her parents. Then the baby… Anyway, she made really beautiful jewelry, but I don’t think she got much money for it. Gave most of it away. Clothes, too. She could fix anything, and make a shirt from any old scraps of material. She was into fashion, too, did some of her own designs.”