to be a young girl, surely no older than Yvonne, wearing only a long grubby white T-shirt with a target on the front, which hardly covered her bare thighs. The top did nothing much to hide her breasts, either, as she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Police,” Enderby said. They showed their warrant cards and introduced themselves.
She didn’t looked scared or nervous, merely puzzled. “Police? Yeah. Right. Okay. Come in, then.” And she stood aside. When they were all inside the hall, she reached her arms in the air, pulling the T-shirt up even higher, and yawned. As he averted his gaze, Chadwick could see that Enderby made no effort to do likewise, that he was gazing with open admiration at her exposed thighs and pubic hair.
“You woke me up,” the girl said. “I was having a nice dream.”
“Who is it, Julie?” came a voice from upstairs, followed by a young man peering down from the landing, a guitar in his hand.
“Police,” said Julie.
“Okay, right, just a minute.” There was a short pause while the young man disappeared back into his room, then visited the toilet. Chadwick thought he could hear the sound of a few quids’ worth of marijuana flushing down the bowl. If he’d been drugs squad, the young lad wouldn’t have stood a chance. When he came down he was without his guitar. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Are you Dennis Nokes?”
“Yes.”
“We’d like to talk to you. Is there somewhere we can go?”
Nokes gestured toward the rear. “Kitchen. Julie’s crashing in the front room. Go back to bed, Julie. It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”
Chadwick could just about make out a sleeping bag, or a pile of blankets, on the floor before the door closed.
The kitchen was cleaner than Chadwick would have expected, but Janet would definitely have turned her nose up and gone at it with the Ajax and Domestos. The chairs were covered with some sort of red plastic material that had cracked and lined like parchment over time, and the table with a red-and-white-checked oilcloth, and on it lay a magazine called
They sat down and Enderby took out his notebook and pen.
“It’s only tobacco,” Nokes said as he rolled a cigarette. He had a tangle of curly dark hair and finely chiseled, almost pixieish, features, and he wore an open-necked blue shirt with jeans and sandals. A necklace of tiny different-colored beads hung around his neck, and a silver bracelet engraved with various occult symbols encircled his left wrist.
“It had better be,” Chadwick said. “Pity you had to flush everything you had down the toilet when that’s not what I came about.”
It only lasted a moment, but Chadwick noticed the look of annoyance that flashed across Nokes’s features before the practiced shrug. “I’ve got nothing to hide from the fuzz.”
“While we’re talking,” said Chadwick, “let’s agree on a few ground rules. It’s not fuzz, or pigs, it’s DI Chadwick and DS Enderby. Okay?”
“Whatever you want,” Nokes agreed, lighting the cigarette.
“Right. I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way. Now let’s get to the real subject of our visit: Linda Lofthouse.”
“Linda?”
“Yes. I assume you’ve heard the news?”
“Bummer, man,” said Nokes. “I was trying to write a song for her when you guys arrived. It’s okay, I mean, I’m not blaming you for interrupting me or anything. It wasn’t going very well.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Chadwick. “I don’t suppose you thought for a moment to come forward with information?”
“Why, man? I haven’t seen Linda in a while.”
“When was the last time?”
“Summer. July, I think. Same time Rick was up.”
“Rick?”
“Rick Hayes, man. He put on the festival.”
“Was he with Linda Lofthouse in July?”
“Not
“Did they know one another well?”
“They’d met, I think. Linda’s cousin’s Vic Greaves, you know, the keyboard player in the Mad Hatters, and Rick promoted some of their gigs in London.”
“Were they going out together?”
“No way, man.” Nokes laughed. “Linda and Rick? You must be joking. She was way out of his league.”
“I thought he made plenty of money from the concerts.”
“It’s not about money, man. Is that all you people ever think of?”
“So what was it about?”
“It was a spiritual thing. Linda was an old soul. Spiritually she was lifetimes ahead of Rick.”
“I see,” said Chadwick. “But they
“Yes. That time. Linda crashed here but Rick was staying in some hotel in town. Didn’t stop him trying to pick up some bird to take back with him, but he ended up going alone.”
“Why was he here?”
“I used to know him a few years ago, when I lived in London. We’re sort of old mates, I suppose. Anyway, he’d come up to check out something at Brimleigh Glen for the festival, so he dropped by to see me.”
Chadwick filed all that information away for his next talk with Rick Hayes, who was proving to be even more of a liar than he had at first appeared to be. “You say Linda hasn’t been here since July?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you seen her since then?”
“No.”
“Were you at Brimleigh?”
“Of course. Rick scored us some free tickets.”
“Did you see her there?”
“No.”
“Where were you between one and one-twenty on Sunday night?”
“How do you expect me to remember that?”
“Led Zeppelin had just started, if that refreshes your memory.”
“Yeah, right. I sat through the whole set in the same place. We were in the middle, quite near the front. We got there early on Friday and staked out a good space.”
“Who was with you?”
Nokes nodded toward the front room. “Julie there, and the others from the house. There were five of us in all.”
“I’ll need names.”
“Sure. There was me, Julie, Martin, Rob and Cathy.”
“Full names, please, sir,” DS Enderby interrupted. Nokes gave him a pitying look and told him.
“Are any of the others at home now?” Chadwick asked.
“Only Julie.”
“We’ll send someone over later to take statements. Now about Linda. Did she stay here around the time of the festival?”
“No. She knows she’s welcome here anytime she wants, man. She doesn’t have to ask, just turn up. But I don’t know where she was staying. Maybe in a tent or out on the field or something. Maybe she was with someone.
