Piece Of My Heart

“And she had your baby.”

Hughes looked down at his oily hands in his lap. “Yeah, well… I tried to make it right, asked her to marry me and all.”

“That’s not the way I hear it.”

“Look, all right. At first I was scared. Wouldn’t you be? I was only sixteen, I didn’t have no job, nothing. We left school. Linda stayed at home with her mum and dad that summer and had the baby, and I… I don’t know, I suppose I brooded about it. Anyway, I decided in the end we should make a go of it. I had a job here at the garage by then and I thought… you know… that we might have had a chance, after all.”

“But?”

“She didn’t want to know, did she? By then she’d got her head full of this hippie rubbish. Bob Dylan and his stupid songs and all the rest of it.”

“When did this start?”

“Before we split up. Just little things. Always correcting me when I said something wrong, like she was a bloody grammar expert. Talking about poets and singers I’d never heard of, reincarnation and karma and I don’t know what else. Always arguing. It was like she wasn’t interested in a normal life.”

“What about her new friends?”

“Long-haired pillocks and poxy birds. I hadn’t time for any of them.”

“Did she chuck you?”

“You could say that.”

“And when you came back, cap in hand, she wanted nothing more to do with you?”

“I suppose so. Then she buggered off to London soon as she’d had the kid. Put him up for adoption. My son.”

“Did you follow her down there?”

“I’d had enough by then. Let her go with her poncy new friends and take all the drugs she wanted.”

“Did she take drugs when she was with you?”

“No, not that I knew of. I wouldn’t have stood for it. But that’s what they do, isn’t it?”

“So they stole her from you, did they? The hippies?”

He looked away. “I suppose you could say that.”

“Made you angry enough to do her harm?”

Hughes stood so violently that his chair tipped over. “What are you getting at? Are you trying to say I killed her?”

“Calm down, laddie. I have to ask these questions. It’s a murder investigation.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m not your murderer.”

“Got a bit of a quick temper, though, haven’t you?”

Hughes said nothing. He picked up the chair and sat again, folding his arms across his chest.

“Did you ever meet any of Linda’s new friends?”

Hughes rubbed the back of his hand across his upper lip and nose. “She took me to this house once,” he said. “I think she wanted me to be like her, and she thought maybe she’d convince me by introducing me to her new friends.”

“When was this?”

“Just after she left school. That summer.”

“Nineteen sixty-seven? When she was pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“We weren’t getting along well at all. Like I said before, she was weird, into all sorts of weird stuff I didn’t understand, like tarot cards and astrology and all that crap. This one time she was going to see some friends and I didn’t want her to go – I wanted her to come to the pictures with me to see You Only Live Twice – but she said she didn’t want to see some stupid James Bond film, and if I wanted to be with her I could come along. If I didn’t… well… she made it clear I didn’t have much choice. So I thought, What the hell, let’s see what’s going on here.”

“Do you remember where she took you?”

“I dunno. It was off Roundhay Road, near that big pub at the junction with Spenser Place.”

“The Gaiety?”

“That’s the one.”

Chadwick knew it. There weren’t many coppers in Leeds, plainclothes or uniformed, who didn’t. “Do you remember the name of the street?”

“No, but it was just over Roundhay Road.”

“One of the Bayswaters?” Chadwick knew the area, a densely packed triangle of streets full of small terraced houses between Roundhay Road, Bayswater Road and Harehills Road. It didn’t have a particularly bad reputation, but quite a few of the houses had been rented to students, and where there were students there were probably drugs.

“That’s the place.”

“Do you know which one?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I think it was the terrace. Or maybe the crescent.”

“Remember where the house was?”

“About halfway.”

“Which side of the street?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Was there anything odd about the place from the outside?”

“No. It looked just like all the others.”

“What color was the door?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay. Thanks,” said Chadwick. Maybe he could find it. It was frustrating to be so close but still so far. Even so, it was probably a cold lead. The students who had been there two years ago might have graduated and left town by now. If they were students.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. There were these people, about five of them, hippies, like, in funny clothes. Freaks.”

“Were they students?”

“Maybe some of them were. I don’t know. They didn’t say. The place smelled like a tart’s window box.”

“That bad?”

“Some sort of perfume smell, anyway. I think it was something they were smoking. One or two of them were definitely on something. You could tell by their eyes and the rubbish they were spouting.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t remember, but it was all ‘cosmic’ this and ‘cosmic’ that, and there was this awful droning music in the background, like someone rubbing a hacksaw on a metal railing.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“I think one of them was called Dennis. It seemed to be his place. And a girl called Julie. She was blowing bubbles and giggling like a little kid. Linda had been there before, I could tell. She knew her way around and didn’t have to ask anyone, you know, like where the kettle or the toilet was or anything.”

“What happened?”

“I wanted to go. I mean, I knew they were taking the mickey because I didn’t talk the same language or like the same music. Even Linda. In the end I said we should leave but she wouldn’t.”

“So what did you do?”

“I left. I couldn’t stick any more of it. I went to see You Only Live Twice by myself.”

There couldn’t have been that many hippies in Leeds during the summer of 1967. It might have been the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, but Leeds was still a northern provincial backwater in many ways, always a little behind the times, and it was only over the past two years or so that the numbers had grown everywhere. The