“What do you mean?”
“Well, somebody murdered her.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t love her.”
“I don’t understand.”
Steve stroked her arm. “It’s a complicated world, Von, and people do things for many reasons, often reasons we don’t understand, reasons they don’t even understand themselves. All I’m saying is that whoever did it didn’t necessarily do it from hatred or jealousy or envy, or one of those other negative emotions. It might have been from love. Or an act of kindness. Sometimes you have to destroy the thing you love the most. It’s not for us to question.”
Yvonne hated it when he talked down to her like that, as if she were indeed a silly schoolgirl who just didn’t get it. But she didn’t get it. To her, Linda had been murdered. No amount of talk about killing for love or kindness made any sense. Perhaps it was because she was a policeman’s daughter, she thought. In which case she had better stop sounding like one, or they would be onto her in a flash.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not for us to question.”
And the second half of the evening started. She could see McGarrity through the crowds, a dark shadow hunched in the candlelight, just to the right of the stage area, and she thought he was staring at her. Then a young man with long blond hair climbed on the tiny stage and began to sing “Polly on the Shore.”
In a booth in a noisy and smoky Italian restaurant on Frith Street, Banks and Annie shared fizzy water and a bottle of the house red, as Banks tucked into his veal marsala and Annie her pasta primavera. Outside, darkness had fallen and the streets and pubs and restaurants of Soho were filling up as people finished work, or arrived in the West End for an evening out. Red and purple lights reflected in the sheen of rain on the pavements and road.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Annie said, fixing her hair behind her ears so it didn’t get in her mouth while she ate.
“About what?” said Banks.
“This Mad Hatters business. I hardly understood a word of what you were talking about before dinner.”
“It’s not my fault if your cultural education is severely lacking,” said Banks.
“Put it down to my callow youth and explain in words of one syllable.”
“You’ve never heard of the Mad Hatters?”
“Of course I have. I’ve even seen them on Jonathan Ross. That’s not the point. I just don’t happen to know their entire bloody history, that’s all.”
“They got big in the late sixties, around the same time as Led Zeppelin, a bit after Pink Floyd and the Who. Their music was different. It had elements of folk-rock, the Byrds and Fairport Convention, but they gave a sort of psychedelic twist to it, at first, anyway. Think ‘Eight Miles High’ meets ‘Sir Patrick Spens.’”
Annie made a face. “I would if I knew what either of those sounded like.”
“I give up,” said Banks. “Anyway, a lot of their sound and style was down to the keyboards player, Vic Greaves, the bloke we were talking about, who now lives in Lyndgarth, and the lead guitarist, Reg Cooper, another Yorkshire lad.”
“Vic Greaves was the keyboards player?”
“Yeah. He was a bit of a Keith Emerson, got amazing sounds out of his organ.”
Annie raised her eyebrows. “The mind boggles.”
“They had light shows, did long guitar solos, wore funny floppy hats and purple velvet trousers, gold caftans, and they did all that other sixties psychedelic stuff. Anyway, in June 1970, not long after their second album hit the charts, the bass player Robin Merchant drowned in Lord Jessop’s swimming pool at Swainsview Lodge.”
“
“The one and only.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“I should imagine so,” said Banks. “That’s something we’ll have to dig up when we get back to Eastvale. There should be files in the basement somewhere.”
“Wonderful,” said Annie. “Last time I went down there I was sneezing for a week.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll send Kev.”
Annie smiled. She could imagine Templeton’s reaction to that, especially since he had become puffed up to an almost unbearable level since his promotion. “Maybe your folksinger friend will know something?” she asked.
“Penny Cartwright?” said Banks, remembering his last, unsatisfactory encounter with Penny on the banks of the river Swain one summer evening. “It was all long before her time. Besides, she’s gone away again. America, this time.”
“What happened to the Mad Hatters?”
“They got another bass player.”
“And what about Vic Greaves?”
“He’d been a problem for a long time. He was unpredictable. Sometimes he didn’t show up for gigs. He’d walk offstage. He got violent with other band members, with his girlfriends. They say there were times he just sat there staring into space, too stoned to play. Naturally, there were stories about the huge quantities of LSD he consumed, not to mention other drugs. He wrote a lot of their early songs and some of the lyrics are very… well, drug-induced, trippy, I suppose you’d say. The rest of the band were a bit more practical and ambitious, and they didn’t know what to do about him, but in the end they didn’t have to worry. He disappeared for a month in late 1970 – September, I think – and when they found him again he was living rough in the countryside like a tramp. He wanted nothing more to do with the music business, been a hermit ever since.”
“Did nobody do anything for him?”
“Like what?”
“Help him get psychiatric help, for a start.”
“Different times, Annie. There was a lot of distrust of conventional psychiatry at the time. You had weirdos like R. D. Laing running around talking about the politics of insanity and quoting William Blake.”
“Blake was a visionary,” said Annie. “A poet and an artist. He didn’t take drugs.”
“I know that. I’m just trying to explain the prevalent attitudes as I understand them. Look, when everyone is weird, just how weird do you have to be to get noticed?”
“I’d say staring into space when you’re supposed to be playing keyboards is a pretty good place to start, not to mention beating up your girlfriend.”
“I agree there’s no excuse for violence, but people still turn a blind eye, even the victims themselves, sometimes. And there was a lot of tolerance within the community for drug consumption, bad trips and suchlike. As for the rest, odd behavior, especially onstage, might just have been regarded as nonconformist or avant-garde theatrics. They say that Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd once put a whole jar of Brylcreem on his head before a performance, and during the show it melted and dripped down his face. People thought it was some sort of artistic statement, not a symptom of insanity. Don’t forget, there were so many weird influences at play. Dadaism, surrealism, nihilism. If John Cage could write four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, who’s to say Greaves wasn’t doing something similar by not playing? You ought to know this, given your bohemian background. Did nobody at your dad’s place ever paint a blank canvas?”
“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,
