Piece Of My Heart

Maybe they had a car. I don’t know, man. All I know is this is freaking me out.”

“Stay calm, Mr. Nokes. Try a few deep breaths. I hear it works wonders.”

Nokes glared at him. “You’re taking the piss.”

“Not at all.”

“This is very upsetting.”

“What? That Linda was murdered or that you’re being questioned?”

Nokes ran the end of his index finger over some grains of salt on the tablecloth. “All of it, man. It’s just so heavy. You’re laying a real trip on us, and you’re way off course. We’re into making love, not killing.”

His whiny voice was starting to grate on Chadwick. “Tell me about Linda.”

“What about her?”

“When did you first meet?”

“Couple of years ago. Not long after I moved here, May, June 1967, around then.”

“And you came up from London?”

“Yeah. I was living down there until early ’67. I’d seen the sort of stuff that was happening, and thought I could make some of it happen up here. Those were really exciting times – great music, poetry readings, light shows, happenings. Revolution was in the air, man.”

“Back to Linda. How did you meet?”

“In town, in a record shop. We were both looking through the folk section, and we just got talking. She was so alone. I mean, she was changing, but she didn’t know it, trying to find herself, didn’t know how to go about it. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Know what I mean?”

“So you helped her to find herself?”

“I invited her around here from time to time. I gave her a few books – Leary, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts. Played music for her. We talked a lot.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No way. She was six months pregnant.”

“Drugs.”

“Of course not.”

“How long did she stay here?”

“Not very long. After she’d had the baby she came here for a while, maybe a month or two the winter of ’67, then she went to London early in ’68. After that she’d crash here when she was up visiting.”

“What did she do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Work? Earn a living? Did she have a job?”

“Oh, that shit. Well, she didn’t when I first met her, of course. She was still living with her parents. Then the baby… Anyway, she made really beautiful jewelry, but I don’t think she got much money for it. Gave most of it away. Clothes, too. She could fix anything, and make a shirt from any old scraps of material. She was into fashion, too, did some of her own designs.”

“So how did she make money?”

“She worked in a shop. Biba. It’s pretty well known. They just moved to Kensington High Street. Do a lot of ’30s nostalgia stuff. You know the sort of thing: all floppy hats, ostrich feathers and long satin dresses in plum and pink.”

“Do you happen to know her address in London?”

Nokes gave him an address in Notting Hill.

“Did she live alone or share?”

“Alone. But she had a good friend living in the same house, across the hall. Came up here with Linda once or twice. American girl. Her name’s Tania Hutchison.”

“What does she look like?”

“Like a dream. I mean, she’s like a negative image of Linda, man, but just as beautiful in her own way. She’s got long dark hair, really long, you know. And she has a dark complexion, like she’s half Mexican or something. And white teeth. But all Americans have white teeth, don’t they?”

It sounded like the girl Robin Merchant had described. So what, if anything, did this Tania Hutchison have to do with Linda Lofthouse’s murder?

There was nothing more to be got from Dennis Nokes, so Chadwick gave Enderby the signal to wrap up the interview. He would send someone to talk to the others later. He didn’t really think that Nokes and his pals had had anything to do with Linda Lofthouse’s murder, but now he at least knew where she had been living, and this Tania woman might be able to tell him something about Linda’s recent life. And death.

Before heading to interview Vic Greaves the following day, Banks first called at Swainsview Lodge out of curiosity, to soak up the atmosphere. He got the keys from the estate agent, who told him they had kept the place locked up tight since there had been reports from local farmers of someone breaking in. She thought it was probably just kids, but the last thing they needed, she said, was squatters or travelers taking occupation of the place.

Entering the cold and drafty hallway, Banks felt as if he were entering one of those creepy mansions from the old Roger Corman films of Poe stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, or something. The long wainscoted hallway had paneled doors opening off each side, and there were obvious spaces on the walls where paintings had once hung. Banks tried some of the doors and found they opened to empty rooms in varied states of disrepair. Bits of ceiling had crumbled, and a veneer of plaster dust lay over everything. Banks kicked clouds of it up as he walked, and it made him cough, made his mouth dry.

At the end of the hall a moth-eaten, dusty old curtain covered French windows. Banks fiddled for the key and opened them. They led out to a broad empty balcony. Banks walked out and leaned against the cool stone of the balustrade to admire the view. Below him lay the empty granite-and-marble swimming pool, its dark bottom clogged with weeds, lichen and rubbish. Lower down the hillside the trees on the banks of the river Swain were red and brown and yellow. Some of the leaves blew off and swirled in the wind as Banks watched. Sheep grazed in the fields of the opposite daleside, dots of white on green among the irregular patterns of drystone walls. The clouds were so low, they grazed the limestone outcrops along the top and shrouded the upper moorland in mist.

Wrapping his arms around himself against the autumn chill, Banks went back inside the building and headed downstairs to the lower level, where he found himself in a cavernous room that he guessed must have been used as the recording studio. So this was where the Mad Hatters had recorded their breakthrough second album during the winter of 1969-1970, and several others over the years. There was no equipment left, of course, but there were still a few strips of wire lying around, along with a broken drumstick, and what looked like a guitar string. Banks strained but could hear no echoes of events or music long past.

He unlocked the doors and walked out to the edge of the swimming pool. There was broken glass on the courtyard and bottles and cans at the bottom of the pool, where it sloped down to the deep end. Banks saw what the estate agent meant, and guessed that local kids must have climbed the wall and had a party. He wondered if they knew the house’s history. Maybe they were celebrating Robin Merchant the way the kids flocked to Jim Morrison’s tomb in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Banks doubted it. He thought he heard a sound behind him, in the abandoned recording studio, and turned in time to see a mouse skitter through the dust.

He tried to imagine the scene on that summer night thirty-five years ago. There would have been music, and probably lights strung up outside, around the pool. Incense. Drugs, of course, and alcohol, too. By the early seventies, booze was coming back in fashion among the younger generation. There would also have been girls, half undressed or more, perhaps, laughing, dancing, making love. And when everyone was sated, Robin Merchant had… well, what had happened? Banks didn’t know yet. Kev Templeton was still in the basement of Western Area Headquarters going through the archives.

A gust of wind rattled the open door and Banks went back inside. There was nothing for him here except ghosts. Lord Jessop was dead of AIDS, poor sod, and Robin Merchant had drowned in the swimming pool. The rest of the Mad Hatters were still very much alive, though, and Vic Greaves was around somewhere. If he would talk. If he could talk. Banks didn’t know exactly what the official diagnosis was, only that everyone claimed he’d taken too much acid and gone over the top. Well, in a short while, with a little skill and a little luck, he would find out.