“I shouldn’t have made a promise I couldn’t possibly keep,” Annie said. “The blame’s entirely mine. I should have done it myself.” She knew that she had deliberately
not
made any such promise to Kelly Soames, but she felt as if she had.
“Pardon me, Guv, but like I said, you weren’t there. Listen to me. He enjoyed it. Enjoyed every minute of it. The humiliation. Taunting her. He drew it out to get more pleasure from it. And in the end he didn’t even know what he’d done wrong. I don’t know if that’s the worst part of it all.”
“Okay, Winsome, I’ll admit DS Templeton has a few problems.”
“A few problems? The man’s a sadist. And you know what?”
“What?”
Winsome shifted in her chair. “Don’t laugh, but there was something…sexual about it.”
“Sexual?”
“Yes. I can’t explain it, but it was like he was getting off on his power over her.”
“Are you certain?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just me, reading things wrongly. It wouldn’t be the first time. But there was something really
creepy about the whole thing, even when the girl was being sick–”
“Kelly was physically sick?”
“Yes. I thought I’d told you that.”
“No. How did it happen?”
“She was just sick.”
“What did DS Templeton do?”
“Just carried on as if everything was normal.”
“Have you told anyone else what happened?”
“No, Guv. I’d tell Superintendent Gervaise if I thought it would do any good, but she thinks the sun shines out of Kevin Templeton’s arse.”
“She does, does she?” That didn’t surprise Annie. Just the mention of Gervaise made her bristle. The sanctimonious cow, putting Annie on statement reading, a DC’s job at best, and making jibes about her private life.
“Anyway,” Winsome went on, “I don’t have to put up with it. There’s nothing in the book says I have to put up with behaviour like that.”
“That’s true,” said Annie. “But life doesn’t always go by the book.”
“It does when you agree with what the book says.”
Annie laughed. “So what do you want to do about it?”
“Dunno,” said Winsome. “Nothing I can do, I suppose. ’Cept I don’t want to be near the creep anymore, and if he ever tries anything, I’ll beat seven shades of shit out of him.”
Annie laughed. The phrase sounded odd coming from Winsome, with her Jamaican lilt. “You can’t avoid him all the time,” she said. “I mean, I can do my best to make sure you’re not paired up or anything, but Superintendent Gervaise can overrule that if she wants, and she seems to want to interfere
with our jobs a bit more than Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe did.”
“I liked Mr. Gristhorpe,” said Winsome. “He was old-fashioned, like my father, and he could be a bit frightening sometimes, but he was fair and he didn’t play favourites.”
Well, Annie thought, that wasn’t strictly true. Banks had certainly been a favourite of Gristhorpe’s, but in general Winsome was right. There was a difference between having favourites and playing them. Gristhorpe hadn’t set out to build a little empire, pick his teams and set people against one another the way it seemed Gervaise was doing. Nor did he interfere in people’s private lives. He must have known about her and Banks, but he hadn’t said anything, at least not to her. He might have warned Banks off, she supposed, but if he had, it hadn’t affected their relationship either on or off the job.
“Well, Gristhorpe’s gone and Gervaise is here,” said Annie, “and for better or worse, we’ve got to live with it.” She looked at her watch. She still had half her drink left. “Look, I’d better go, Winsome. I’m not over the limit yet, but I will be if I have any more.”
“You can stay at mine, if you like.” Winsome looked away. “I’m sorry, Guv, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I mean, you being an inspector and all, my boss, but I’ve got a spare room. It’s just that it helps talking about it, that’s all. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like getting rat-arsed.”
Annie thought for a moment. “What the hell,” she said, finishing her drink. “I’ll get another round.”
“No, you stay there. It’s my shout.”
Annie sat and watched her walk to the bar, a tall, graceful, long-legged Jamaican beauty about whom she knew…well, not very much at all. But then she didn’t really know very
much about anyone, when it came right down to it, she realized, not even Banks. And as she watched, she smiled to herself. Wouldn’t it be funny, she thought, if she did stay at Winsome’s and Superintendent Gervaise found out. What would the sad cow make of that?
Monday, September 22, 1969
“But we’ve got no real evidence, Stan,” Detective Chief Superintendent McCullen argued on Monday morning. They were in his office and rain spattered the windows, blurring the view.
Chadwick ran his hand over his hair. He’d thought this out in advance, hadn’t done anything else but think it over, all night. He didn’t want Yvonne involved; that was the main problem. He had seen the bruise McGarrity had caused on her arm, and it was enough to bring assault charges, but once he went that route, he wouldn’t be able to do anything for Yvonne. She was upset enough as it was, and he didn’t want to drag her through court. If truth be told, he didn’t want his name tainted by his daughter’s folly, either. He thought he could make a decent case without her, and he laid it out carefully for McCullen.
“First off, he’s got form,” he said.
McCullen raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“The most recent’s for possession of a controlled substance, namely LSD. November 1967.”
“Only possession?”
“They think he dumped his stash down the toilet when he heard them coming. Unfortunately, he still had two doses in his pocket.”
“You said most recent?”
“Yes. The other’s a bit more interesting. March 1958.”
“How old was he then?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And?”
“Assault causing bodily harm. He stabbed a student in the shoulder during a town-and-gown altercation in Oxford, which apparently is where he comes from. Unfortunately the student happened to be the son of a local member of Parliament.”
“Ouch,” said McCullen, a sly smile touching his lips.
“It didn’t help that McGarrity was a Teddy boy as well. Apparently the judge didn’t like teds. Threw the book at him. He was a Brasenose man, too, same as the student. Gave McGarrity eighteen months. If the wound had been more serious, and if it hadn’t been inflicted defensively during a scuffle–apparently the gown lot were carrying cricket bats, among other weapons–then he’d have got five years or more. Another interesting point,” Chadwick went on, “is that the weapon used was a flick knife.”
“The same weapon used on the girl?”
“Same
kind
of weapon.”
“Go on.”
“There’s not much more,” Chadwick said. “We spent yesterday interviewing the people at the three houses who knew McGarrity. He definitely knew the victim.”
“How well?”
“There’s no evidence of any sort of relationship, and from what I’ve found out about Linda Lofthouse, I very much doubt that there was one. But he knew her.”
“Anything else?”
“Everyone said he was an odd duck. They often didn’t understand what he was talking about, and he had a habit of playing with a flick knife.”
“What kind of flick knife?”
“Just a flick knife, with a tortoiseshell handle.”
“Why did they put up with him?”
“If you ask me, sir, it’s down to drugs. Our lads found five ounces of cannabis resin hidden in the gas meter at Carberry Place. Apparently the lock was broken. We think it belonged to McGarrity.”
“Defrauding the gas company, too, I’ll bet?”
Chadwick smiled. “Same shilling, again and again. The drugs squad thinks he’s a mid-level dealer, buys a few ounces now and then and splits them up into quid deals. Probably what he used the knife for.”
“So the kids tolerate him?”
“Yes, sir. He was also at the festival, and according to the people he went with, he spent most of the time roaming the crowd on his own. No one can say where he was when the incident occurred.”
McCullen tapped his pipe on the ashtray, then said, “The knife?”
“No sign of it yet, sir.”
“Pity.”
“Yes. I suppose it might be a coincidence that McGarrity simply lost his knife around the same time a young woman was stabbed with a similar weapon, but we’ve gone to court with less before.”
“Aye. And lost from time to time.”
“Well, the judge has bound him over on the dealing charge. No fixed abode, so no bail. He’s all ours.”
“Then get cracking and build up a murder case if you think you’ve got one. But don’t get tunnel vision here, Stan. Don’t forget that other bloke you fancied for it.”
“Rick Hayes? We’re still looking into him.”
“Good. And, Stan?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Find the knife. It would really help.”
Some people, Banks realized, never travel very far from where they grow up, and Simon Bradley was one of them. He had, he said, transferred several times during his career, to Suffolk, Cumbria and Nottingham, but he had ended up back in Leeds, and when he had retired in 2000 at the age of fifty-six and at the rank of superintendent, Traffic, he and his wife had settled in a nice detached stone-built house just off Shaw Lane in Headingley. It was, he told Banks, only a stone’s throw from where he grew up in more lowly Meanwood. Beyond the high green gate was a well-tended garden that, Bradley said, was his wife’s pride and joy. Bradley’s pride and joy, it turned out, was a small library of floor-to-ceiling shelves, where he kept his collection of first-edition crime and thriller fiction, primarily Dick Francis, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Colin Dexter. It was there that he sat with Banks over coffee and talked about his early days at Brotherton House. Sitting in the peaceful, book-lined room, Banks found it hard to believe that just down the road was Hyde Park, where one of that summer’s suicide bombers had lived.
“I was young,” Bradley said, “twenty-five in 1969, but I was never really one of that generation.” He laughed. “I suppose that would have been difficult, wouldn’t it, being a hippie and a copper at the same time? Sort of like being on both sides at once.”
“I’m a few years behind you,” said Banks, “but I did like the music. Still do.”
“Really? Dreadful racket,” said Bradley. “I’ve always been more of a classical man myself: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.”
“I like them, too,” said Banks, “but sometimes you can’t beat a bit of Jimi Hendrix.”
“Each to his own. I suppose I always associated the music too closely with the lifestyle and the things that went on back then,” Bradley said with distaste. “A soundtrack for the drugs, long hair, promiscuity. I was something of a young fogey, a
square
, I suppose, and now I’ve grown up into an old fogey. I went to church every Sunday, kept my hair cut short and believed in waiting until you were married before having sex. Still do, much to my son’s chagrin. Very unfashionable.”
Bradley was almost ten years older than Banks, and he was in good physical shape. There was no extra flab on him the way there had been on Enderby, and he still had a fine head of hair. He was wearing white trousers and a shirt with a grey V-neck pullover, a bit like a cricketer, Banks thought, or the way cricketers used to look before they became walking multicoloured advertisements for everything from mobile phones to trainers.
“Did you get on well with DI Chadwick?” Banks asked, remembering Enderby’s description of “Chiller” as cold and hard.
“After a fashion,” said Bradley. “DI Chadwick wasn’t an easy man to get close to. He’d had certain…experiences…during the war, and he tended towards long silences you didn’t dare interrupt. He never spoke about it–the war–but you knew it was there, defining him, in a way, as it did many of that generation. But, yes, I suppose I got along with him as well as anyone.”
“Do you remember the Linda Lofthouse case?”
“As if it were yesterday. Bound to happen eventually.”
“What was?”
“What happened to her. Linda Lofthouse. Bound to. I mean, all those people rolling in the mud on LSD and God knows
what. Bound to revert to their primitive natures at some point, weren’t they? Strip away that thin but essential veneer of civilization and convention, of obedience and order, and what do you get–the beast within, Mr. Banks, the beast within. Someone was bound to get hurt. Stands to reason. I’m only surprised there wasn’t more of it.”
“But what do you think it was about Linda Lofthouse that got her killed?”
“At first, when I saw her there in the sleeping bag, you know, with her dress bunched up, I must confess I thought it was probably a sex murder. She had that look about her, you know?”
“What look?”
“A lot of young girls had it then. As if she’d invite you into her sleeping bag as soon as look at you.”
“But she was dead.”
“Well, yes, of course. I know that.” Bradley gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, I’m not a necrophiliac or anything. I’m just telling you the first impression I had of her. Turned out it wasn’t a sex crime after all, but some madman. As I said, bound to happen when you encourage deviant behaviour. She’d had an illegitimate baby, you know.”
“Linda Lofthouse?”
“Yes. She was on the pill when we found her, like most of them, of course, but obviously not when she was fifteen. Gave it up for adoption in 1967.”
“Did anyone find out what became of the child?”
“It didn’t concern us. We tracked down the father, a kid called Donald Hughes, garage mechanic, and he gave us a couple of ideas as to the sort of life Linda was leading and where she was living it, but he had an alibi, and he had no motive. He’d moved on. Got a proper job, wanted nothing to do with Linda and her hippie lifestyle. That was why they split
up in the first place. If she hadn’t been seduced by that corrupt lifestyle, the baby might have grown up with a proper mother and father.”
The child’s identity might be an issue now, Banks thought. A child born in the late sixties would be in his late thirties now, and if he had discovered what had happened to his birth mother…Nick Barber was thirty-eight, but he was the victim. Banks was confusing too many crimes: Lofthouse, Merchant, Barber. He had to get himself in focus. At least the connection between Barber and Lofthouse was something he could check into and not come away looking too much of a fool if he was wrong.