smell as being a mix of tobacco and hash. That, in itself, was enough to charge them with possession.
What the hell did Yvonne see in this dump? Chadwick wondered. Why did she come here? Was her life at home so bad? Was she so desperate to get away from him and Janet? But there was no point trying to work it out. As Enderby had said, it was probably down to freedom.
Chadwick heard a brief scuffle and a bang upstairs, followed by a series of loud thumps, each one getting closer. When he went to the foot of the stairs, he saw the two uniformed constables, one without his hat, holding the arms of a man who was struggling to get up.
“He didn’t want to come with us, sir,” one of the officers said.
It looked as if they had held his arms and dragged him down the stairs backward, which shouldn’t have done much damage to anything except his dignity and maybe his tailbone. Chadwick watched as the unruly black-clad figure with the lank dark hair and pockmarked face got to his feet and dusted himself off, the superior smirk already back in place, if indeed it had ever been gone.
“Well, well, well,” he said, “Mr. McGarrity, I assume? I’ve been wanting a word with you.”
Enderby’s local, two streets down, was like his house: comfortable and unremarkable. It was a relatively new building, late sixties from its low squat shape and the large picture windows facing the sea. The advantages, from Banks’s point of view, were that it was practically empty at that time in the afternoon, and they sold cask- conditioned Tetley’s. One pint wouldn’t do him any harm, he decided, as he bought the drinks at the bar and carried them over.
Enderby looked at him. “Thought your resolve might weaken.”
“It often does,” Banks admitted. “Nice view.”
Enderby took a sip of beer. “Mmm.”
The window looked out over the glittering North Sea, dotted here and there with fishing boats and trawlers. Whitby was still a thriving fishing town, Banks reminded himself, even if the whaling industry it had grown from was long extinct. Captain Cook had got his seafaring start in Whitby, and his statue stood on top of West Cliff, close to the jawbone of a whale.
“When did this real murder happen?” Banks asked.
“September the year before. In 1969. By Christ, Banks, you’re taking me on a hell of a trip along Memory Lane today. I haven’t thought about that business in years.”
Banks knew all about trips down Memory Lane, having not so long ago looked into the disappearance of an old schoolfriend whose body was found buried in a field outside Peterborough. Sometimes, as he got older, it seemed as if the past was always overwhelming the present.
“Who was the victim?”
“A woman, young girl, really, called Linda Lofthouse. Lovely girl. Funny, I can still picture her there, half-covered by the sleeping bag. That white dress with the flowers embroidered on the front. She had a flower painted on her face, too. A cornflower. She looked so peaceful. She was dead, of course. Someone had grabbed her from behind and stabbed her so viciously he cut off a piece of her heart.” He gave a little shudder. “Someone’s just walked over my grave.”
“How was Swainsview Lodge involved in all this?”
“I’m getting to that. The murder took place at a rock festival in Brimleigh Glen. The body was found on the field by one of the volunteers cleaning up after it was all over. The evidence showed that she was killed in Brimleigh Woods nearby and then moved. It was only made to look as if she was killed on the field.”
“I know Brimleigh Glen,” said Banks. He had taken his wife, Sandra, and the children, Brian and Tracy, on picnics there shortly after they had moved to Eastvale. “But I know nothing about any festival.”
“Probably before your time here,” said Enderby. “First weekend of September, 1969. Not so long after Woodstock and the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t one of the really big ones. It was overshadowed by the others. And it was also the only one they ever held there.”
“Who played?”
“The biggest names at the time were Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac. The others? Maybe you remember Family, the Incredible String Band, Roy Harper, Blodwyn Pig, Colosseum, the Liverpool Scene, Edgar Broughton and the rest. The usual late-sixties festival lineup.”
Banks knew all those names, even had a number of their CDs, or used to have. He would have to work harder at building up his collection again instead of just buying new stuff or recent reissues. He needed to make a note whenever he missed something he used to have. “How were the Mad Hatters involved?” he asked.
“They were one of the two local bands to play there, along with Jan Dukes de Grey. The Hatters were just getting big at the time, in late 1969, and it was a pivotal gig for them.”
“You’ve followed their career since then?” said Banks.
Enderby raised his glass. “Of course. I was more into blues back then – still am, really – but I got all their records. I mean, I met them, got a signed album. It was a big thrill. Even if I didn’t get to keep it.” He smiled at a distant memory.
“Why didn’t you get to keep it?”
“DI Chadwick took it for his daughter. Good Lord, Chiller Chadwick. I haven’t thought of him in years. What a cold, hard bastard he was to work for. Tough Scot, ex-army, hard as nails. The old school, you know, stickler for detail. Always perfectly turned out. You could see your reflection in his brogues. That sort of thing. I’m afraid I was a bit of a rebel back then. Let my hair grow down to my collar. He didn’t like it one bit. Good detective, though. I learned a lot from Chiller Chadwick. And he did apologize about the LP, I’ll give him that.”
“What happened to him?”
“No idea. Retired, I suppose. Maybe dead now. He was quite a few years older than me. Fought in the war. And he was with West Yorkshire, see. Leeds. They didn’t reckon we’d got anyone bright enough up here to solve a murder, and they might have been right at that. Anyway, I heard there was some sort of trouble with his daughter, and it affected his health.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“I don’t know. She went away to stay with relatives. I never met her. I think perhaps she was a bit of a wild child, though, and he wouldn’t stand for that, wouldn’t Chiller. You know what some of the kids were like back then, smoking marijuana, dropping acid, sleeping around. Anyway, whatever it was, he kept it under his hat. You should talk to his driver, if he’s still around.”
“Who’s that?”
“Young lad called Bradley. Simon Bradley. He was a DC then, Chiller’s driver. But now, who knows? Probably a chief constable.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Bit of an arse-licker. They always get ahead, don’t they?”
“What was Chadwick’s first name?”
“Stanley.”
Banks thought that Templeton or Winsome ought to be able to track Simon Bradley down easily enough, and if Leeds was involved, he might be able to enlist the help of DI Ken Blackstone to find out about Chadwick. He offered Enderby another drink, which Enderby accepted. Banks’s pint glass, fortunately, was still half full.
“I take it this murder was solved?” Banks asked when he returned with the drink.
“Oh, yes. We got him, all right.”
“So back to how the Mad Hatters and Swainsview Lodge were involved?”
“Oh, yes, forgot about that, didn’t I? Well, Vic Greaves was the victim’s cousin, see, and he’d arranged for her and her friend to get backstage passes for the festival. While she was backstage during Led Zeppelin’s performance on the last night, this cousin, Linda Lofthouse, decided to take a walk in the woods by herself. That’s where she was killed.”
“Any sexual motive?”
“She wasn’t raped, if that’s what you mean. They did find some semen on the back of her dress, though, so what he did obviously gave him some sort of thrill. Secretor. Mind you, it was a common enough blood group. A, if I remember correctly, same as the victim’s. We didn’t have DNA and all that fancy forensic technology back then, so we had to rely on good old-fashioned police work.”
“Did you recover the murder weapon?”
