“We really need to know where Vic Greaves lives,” said Banks.
“I understand that, and if I knew his address, I’d tell you. Nick mentioned a village called Lyndgarth in North Yorkshire. I’ve never heard of it, but apparently it’s near Eastvale, if that’s any help. That’s all I know.”
Banks knew that he ought to be able to find Vic Greaves in Lyndgarth easily enough. “I know it,” he said. “It’s very close to where Nick was staying. Walking distance, in fact. Do you happen to know if he had already spoken to Greaves?”
“Once.”
“And?”
“It didn’t go well. According to Nick, Greaves freaked out, refused to talk, as usual, sent him packing. To be honest, I very much doubt you’ll get any sense out of him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nobody knows. He went strange, that’s all. Has been for years.”
“When did Nick talk to him?”
“He didn’t say. Sometime last week.”
“What day did he phone you?”
“Friday, Friday morning.”
“What was he going to do?”
“Talk to Greaves again. Work out a different approach. Nick was good. He’d simply tested the waters. He’d have found something to catch Greaves’s interest, some common ground, and he’d have taken it from there.”
“Have you any idea,” Banks asked, “why this story should have cost Nick Barber his life?”
“None at all,” said Butler, spreading his hands. “I still can’t really believe that it did. I mean, maybe what happened was nothing to do with the Hatters. Have you considered that? Maybe it was an irate husband. Bit of a swordsman, was our Nick.”
“Any husband in particular who might have wanted him dead recently?”
“Not that I know of. He never seemed to stick with anyone for long, especially if they started to get clingy. He liked his independence. And the music always got in the way. Most of our guys live alone in flats, when you get right down to it. They’d rather be ferreting out old vinyl on Berwick Street than go out with a girl. They’re loners, obsessed.”
“So Nick Barber would love ’em and leave ’em?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe it was an irate girlfriend, then?”
Butler laughed uneasily.
Banks thought of Kelly Soames again, but he didn’t think she had killed Nick Barber, and not only because of the discrepancy in timing. There was still her father, though, Calvin Soames. He had disappeared from the pub for fifteen minutes, and nobody had seen him return to his farm in Lyndgarth to check the gas ring. Admittedly, it was a bad night, and the farm was off the beaten track, but it was still worth further consideration. The question was, had Soames been hiding the fact that he knew about Barber and Kelly? Banks couldn’t tell. And if he had done it, why take all Barber’s stuff?
When it came right down to it, though, Banks had a gut feeling that it was the Mad Hatters story that got Barber killed. He had no idea why. Unless you were a soul or a rap artist, music was generally a murder-free profession, and it was a bit of a stretch to imagine aging hippies going around bashing people over the head with pokers. But there it was. Nick Barber had headed to Yorkshire in search of a reclusive ex-rock star, had found him, and within days he had turned up dead, all his notes, mobile phone and laptop computer missing.
Banks thanked Butler for his time and said he might be back with more questions. Butler accompanied him back to the lift, stopping to pick out some back issues for him on the way. Banks walked out onto busy Oxford Street a little more enlightened than when he had entered Mappin House. He noticed that he was standing right outside HMV, so he went inside.
The mood in the Grove was subdued that Monday evening. Somebody had turned out all the electric lights and put candles on every table. Yvonne sat at the back of the small room, near the door, with Steve, Julie and a bunch of others. McGarrity was there, though thankfully not sitting with them. At one point he took the stage and recited a T. S. Eliot poem. That was typical of him, Yvonne thought. He dismissed everybody else’s poetry, but didn’t even have the creativity to make up his own. There was a bit of talk about a concert in Toronto that Saturday, where John Lennon and Yoko had turned up to play with some legendary rock ’n’ roll stars, and some desultory conversation about the Los Angeles murders, but mostly people seemed to have turned in on themselves. They had known the previous Monday that something had happened at Brimleigh, of course, but now it was all over the place – and the victim’s name had been in that morning’s paper and on the evening news. Many people had known her, at least by name or by sight.
Yvonne was still stunned by the signed Mad Hatters LP her father had given her before she went out that evening. She couldn’t imagine him even being in the same room as such a fantastic band, let alone asking them to sign a copy of their LP. But he was full of surprises these days. Maybe there was hope for him yet.
McGarrity’s Eliot travesty aside, most of the evening was given over to local folksingers. A plump short-haired girl in jeans and a T-shirt sang “She Walks Through the Fair” and “Farewell, Farewell.” A curly-haired troubadour with a gap between his front teeth sang “The Trees They Do Grow High” and “Needle of Death,” followed by a clutch of early Bob Dylan songs.
There was a somber tone to it all, and Yvonne knew, although it was never said, that this was a farewell concert for Linda. Other people in the place had known her far better than Yvonne had; in fact she had sung there on more than one occasion when she visited her friends in Leeds. Everybody had looked forward to her visits. Yvonne wished she could be like that, the kind of person who had such a radiant spiritual quality that people were drawn to her. But she also couldn’t forget that someone had been drawn to kill her.
She remembered the photograph that had slipped out of her father’s briefcase: Linda with an expressionless face and eyes. The pathetic little cornflower on her cheek; Linda not at home; dead Linda, just a shell, her spirit soared off into the light. She felt herself well up with tears as she thought her thoughts and listened to the sad songs of long ago, ballads of murder and betrayal, of supernatural lovers, metamorphoses, disasters at sea and wasted youth. She wasn’t supposed to drink, but she could easily pass for eighteen in the Grove, and Steve brought her drinks like Babycham, Pony and Cherry B. After a while she started to feel light-headed and sick.
She made her way to the toilet and forced her finger down her throat. That helped. When she had finished she rinsed her mouth out, washed her face and lit a cigarette. She didn’t look too bad. On her way out she had to squeeze past McGarrity in the narrow corridor, and the look of cruel amusement on his face at her obvious discomfort frightened her. He paused, pressed up against her breasts, ran one dirty, nail-bitten finger down her cheek and whispered her name. It made her shiver.
When she got back to Steve and the others, it was intermission. She hadn’t brought up the subject of Linda with Steve yet, partly because she was afraid that he might have slept with her, and that would make Yvonne jealous. It shouldn’t. Jealousy was a negative emotion, Steve always said, to be cast aside, but she couldn’t help it. Linda was so perfect, and beside her Yvonne felt like a naive awkward schoolgirl. Finally, she made herself do it.
“Did you know Linda well?” she asked him as casually as possible.
Steve rolled a cigarette from his Old Holborn tin before answering. “Not really,” he said. “She’d gone before I came on the scene. I only saw her a couple of times when she came up from London and stayed at Dennis’s.”
“Bayswater Terrace? Is that where she lived?”
“Yeah. Before she went to London.”
“With Dennis?”
“No, not
Yvonne felt flustered. “It doesn’t. It… I mean… I only met her once, myself, and I liked her, that’s all.”
“Everybody loved Linda.”
“Not everybody, obviously.”
