Piece Of My Heart

papers anyway. “Have you any idea what happened to the baby, or the father?”

“I’ve seen Don around. He’s been going out with Pamela Davis for about a year now. I think they might be engaged. He works in a garage on Kirkstall Road, near the viaduct. I remember Linda talking about having the baby adopted. I don’t think she planned on keeping it.”

The mother would probably know, not that it mattered. Whoever had killed Linda Lofthouse, it wasn’t a two- year-old. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Linda?” he asked.

“Not really,” said Carol. “I mean, I don’t know what you want to hear. We were best friends, but we sort of drifted apart, as you do. I don’t know what she got up to the last two years. I’m sorry to hear that she was killed, though. That’s terrible. Why would somebody do a thing like that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Chadwick, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. He didn’t think it came over very well. He stood up. “Thanks for your time, and for the information.”

“You’ll let me know? When you find out.”

“I’ll let you know,” said Chadwick, standing up. “Please, stay here with the baby. I’ll let myself out.”

“What’s up with you, then?” asked Cyril, the landlord of the Queen’s Arms, as Banks ordered a bitter lemon and ice late that afternoon. “Doctor’s orders?”

“More like boss’s orders,” Banks grumbled. “We’ve got a new super. She’s dead keen and seems to have eyes in the back of her bloody head.”

“She’ll get nowt out of me,” said Cyril. “My lips are sealed.”

Banks laughed. “Cheers, mate. Maybe another time.”

“Bad for business, this new boss of yours.”

“Give us time,” said Banks, with a wink. “We’ll get her trained.”

He took his glass over to a dimpled copper-topped table over by the window and contemplated its unappetizing contents gloomily. The ashtray was half full of crushed filters and ash. Banks pushed it as far away as he could. Now that he no longer smoked, he’d come to loathe the smell of cigarettes. He’d never noticed it before, as a smoker, but when he got home from the pub his clothes stank and he had to put them straight in the laundry basket. Which would be fine if he got around to doing his laundry more often.

Annie turned up at six o’clock, as arranged. She’d been at Fordham earlier, Banks knew, and had talked to Kelly Soames. She got herself a Britvic Orange and joined him. “Christ,” she said, when she saw Banks’s drink. “They’ll be thinking we’re all on the wagon.”

“Too true. Good day?”

“Not bad, I suppose. You?”

Banks swirled the liquid in his glass. Ice clinked against the sides. “I’ve had better,” he said. “Just come from the postmortem.”

“Ah.”

“No picnic. Never is. Even after all these years you never get quite used to it.”

“I know,” said Annie.

“Anyway,” Banks went on, “we weren’t far wrong in our original suspicions. Nick Barber was in generally good health apart from being bashed on the back of the head with a poker. It fits the wound, and Dr. Glendenning says he was hit four times, once when he was standing up, which accounts for most of the blood spatter, and three times when he was on the floor.”

Annie raised an eyebrow. “Overkill?”

“Not necessarily. The doc said it needn’t have been a frenzied attack, just that whoever did it wanted to make sure his victim was dead. In all likelihood he’d have got a bit of blood on him, too, and blood’s hard to get rid of. It might give us something we can use in court if we ever catch the bastard. Anyway, there were no prints on the poker, so our killer obviously wiped it clean.”

“What do you make of it all?”

“I don’t know,” said Banks, sipping bitter lemon and pulling a face. “It certainly doesn’t look professional, and it wasn’t frenzied enough to look like a lovers’ quarrel, not that we can rule that out.”

“I doubt if the motive was robbery, either.” Annie told Banks more detail than she had given him over the phone about her conversation with Kelly Soames and what little she had discovered about Barber from her.

“And the timing is interesting,” Banks added.

“What do you mean?”

“Was he killed before or after the power cut? All the doc can tell us is that it probably happened between six and eight. One bloke left the pub at seven and came back around quarter past. The others bear this out, but nobody saw him in Lyndgarth. Banks consulted his notes. Name of Calvin Soames.”

“Soames?” said Annie. “That’s the barmaid’s name. Kelly Soames. He must be her father. I recognized him when he dropped her off.”

“That’s right,” said Banks.

“She said he’s always in the pub when she’s working. I know she was terrified of him finding out about her and Nick.”

“I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow.”

“Go carefully, Alan. He didn’t know about her and Nick Barber. Apparently he’s a very strict father.”

“That’s not such a terrible thing, is it? Anyway, I’ll do my best. But if he really did know…”

“I understand,” said Annie.

“And don’t forget Jack Tanner,” said Banks. “We don’t know what motive he might have had, but he had a connection with the victim, through his wife. We’d better check his alibi thoroughly.”

“It’s being done,” said Annie. “Ought to be easy enough to check with his darts cronies. And I’ve got Kev following up on all the blokes who left the pub between the relevant times.”

“Good. Now the tourist couple, the Browns, say they arrived at about a quarter to eight and thought they saw a car heading up the hill, right?”

Annie consulted the notes she had taken in the incident van. “Someone from the youth hostel, a New Zealander called Vanessa Napier, told PC Travers that she saw a car going by at about half past seven or a quarter to eight on Friday evening, shortly after the lights went off. She was looking out of her window at the storm.”

“Did she get any details?”

“No. It was dark, and she doesn’t know a Honda from a Fiat.”

“Doesn’t help us much, does it?”

“It’s all we’ve got. They questioned everyone in the hostel and Vanessa’s the only one who saw anything.”

“She’s not another one been shagging our Nick, too, has she?”

Annie laughed. “I shouldn’t think so.”

“Hmm,” Banks said. “There seem to have been more comings and goings between half past seven and eight than there were earlier.”

“Yorkshire Electricity confirms the power went out at seven twenty-eight p.m.”

“The problem is,” Banks went on, “that if the killer came from some distance away and timed his arrival for half seven or a quarter to eight, he can’t have known there would be a power cut, so it’s not a factor.”

“Maybe it gave him an opportunity,” Annie said. “They’re arguing, the lights go out, Nick turns to reach for his cigarette lighter and the killer seizes the moment and lashes out.”

“Possibly,” said Banks. “Though the darkness would have made it a bit harder for him to search the cottage and be certain he took away everything he needed to. Also, your eyes need time to adjust. Look at the timing. Mrs. Tanner showed up at eight. That didn’t give him much time to search in the dark and check Barber’s car.”

“He might have had a torch in his own vehicle.”

“He’d still have had to go and get it. There would’ve been no reason for him to be carrying one if he arrived before the power cut.”

“Does the electricity failure really matter, then?”

“I think we can assume that the killer would have done what he came to do anyway, and if the lights went out, that just gave him a better opportunity.”

“What about the Browns? Their timing is interesting.”

“Yes,” said Banks. “But do they strike you as the types to kill someone and then drop by the local pub for a