“Pity.”
“Yes. I suppose it might be a coincidence that McGarrity simply lost his knife around the same time a young woman was stabbed with a similar weapon, but we’ve gone to court with less before.”
“Aye. And lost from time to time.”
“Well, the judge has bound him over on the dealing charge. No fixed abode, so no bail. He’s all ours.”
“Then get cracking and build up a murder case if you think you’ve got one. But don’t get tunnel vision here, Stan. Don’t forget that other bloke you fancied for it.”
“Rick Hayes? We’re still looking into him.”
“Good. And, Stan?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Find the knife. It would really help.”
Some people, Banks realized, never travel very far from where they grow up, and Simon Bradley was one of them. He had, he said, transferred several times during his career, to Suffolk, Cumbria and Nottingham, but he had ended up back in Leeds, and when he had retired in 2000 at the age of fifty-six and the rank of superintendent, Traffic, he and his wife had settled in a nice detached stone-built house just off Shaw Lane in Headingley. It was, he told Banks, only a stone’s throw from where he grew up in more lowly Meanwood. Beyond the high green gate was a well-tended garden that, Bradley said, was his wife’s pride and joy. Bradley’s pride and joy, it turned out, was a small library of floor-to-ceiling shelves, where he kept his collection of first-edition crime and thriller fiction, primarily Dick Francis, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Colin Dexter. It was there he sat with Banks over coffee and talked about his early days at Brotherton House. Sitting in the peaceful book-lined room, Banks found it hard to believe that just down the road was Hyde Park, where one of that summer’s suicide bombers had lived.
“I was young,” Bradley said, “twenty-five in 1969, but I was never really one of that generation.” He laughed. “I suppose that would have been difficult, wouldn’t it, being a hippie and a copper at the same time? Sort of like being on both sides at once.”
“I’m a few years behind you,” said Banks, “but I did like the music. Still do.”
“Really? Dreadful racket,” said Bradley. “I’ve always been more of a classical man myself: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.”
“I like them, too,” said Banks, “but sometimes you can’t beat a bit of Jimi Hendrix.”
“Each to his own. I suppose I always associated the music too closely with the lifestyle and the things that went on back then,” Bradley said with distaste. “A sound track for the drugs, long hair, promiscuity. I was something of a young fogy, a
Bradley was almost ten years older than Banks, and he was in good physical shape. There was no extra flab on him the way there had been on Enderby, and he still had a fine head of hair. He was wearing white trousers and a shirt with a gray V-neck pullover, a bit like a cricketer, Banks thought, or the way cricketers used to look before they became walking multicolored advertisements for everything from mobile phones to trainers.
“Did you get on well with DI Chadwick?” Banks asked, remembering Enderby’s description of “Chiller” as cold and hard.
“After a fashion,” said Bradley. “DI Chadwick wasn’t an easy man to get close to. He’d had certain… experiences… during the war, and he tended toward long silences you didn’t dare interrupt. He never spoke about it – the war – but you knew it was there, defining him, in a way, as it did many of that generation. But yes, I suppose I got along with him as well as anyone.”
“Do you remember the Linda Lofthouse case?”
“As if it were yesterday. Bound to happen eventually.”
“What was?”
“What happened to her. Linda Lofthouse. Bound to. I mean, all those people rolling in the mud on LSD and God knows what. Bound to revert to their primitive natures at some point, weren’t they? Strip away that thin but essential veneer of civilization and convention, of obedience and order, and what do you get – the beast within, Mr. Banks, the beast within. Someone was bound to get hurt. Stands to reason. I’m only surprised there wasn’t more of it.”
“But what do you think it was about Linda Lofthouse that got her killed?”
“At first, when I saw her there in the sleeping bag, you know, with her dress bunched up, I must confess I thought it was probably a sex murder. She had that look about her, you know?”
“What look?”
“A lot of young girls had it then. As if she’d invite you into her sleeping bag as soon as look at you.”
“But she was dead.”
“Well, yes, of course. I know that.” Bradley gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, I’m not a necrophiliac or anything. I’m just telling you the first impression I had of her. Turned out it wasn’t a sex crime after all, but some madman. As I said, bound to happen when you encourage deviant behavior. She’d had an illegitimate baby, you know.”
“Linda Lofthouse?”
“Yes. She was on the pill when we found her, like most of them, of course, but obviously not when she was fifteen. Gave it up for adoption in 1967.”
“Did anyone find out what became of the child?”
“It didn’t concern us. We tracked down the father, a kid called Donald Hughes, garage mechanic, and he gave us a couple of ideas as to the sort of life Linda was leading and where she was living it, but he had an alibi, and he had no motive. He’d moved on. Got a proper job, wanted nothing to do with Linda and her hippie lifestyle. That was why they split up in the first place. If she hadn’t been seduced by that corrupt lifestyle, the baby might have grown up with a proper mother and father.”
The child’s identity might be an issue now, Banks thought. A child born in the late sixties would be in his late thirties now, and if he had discovered what had happened to his birth mother… Nick Barber was thirty-eight, but he was the victim. Banks was confusing too many crimes: Lofthouse, Merchant, Barber. He had to get himself in focus. At least the connection between Barber and Lofthouse was something he could check into and not come away looking too much of a fool if he was wrong.
“What was the motive?”
“We never found out. He was a nutcase.”
“That being the technical term for a psychopath back then?”
“It’s what we used to call them,” Bradley said, “but I suppose psychopath or sociopath – I never did know the difference – would be more politically correct.”
“He confessed to the murder?”
“As good as.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t deny it when faced with the evidence.”
“The knife, right?”
“With his fingerprints and Linda Lofthouse’s blood on it.”
“How did this person – what’s his name, by the way?”
“McGarrity. Patrick McGarrity.”
“How did this McGarrity first come to your attention?”
“We found out that the victim was known at various houses around the city where students and dropouts lived and sold drugs. McGarrity frequented these same places, was a drug dealer, in fact, which was what we first arrested him for after a raid.”
“And then DI Chadwick became suspicious?”
“Well, yes. We heard that McGarrity was a bit of a nutcase, and even the people whose houses he frequented were a bit frightened of him. There was a lot of tolerance for weird types back then, especially if they provided people with drugs, which is why I say I’m surprised these things didn’t happen more often. This McGarrity clearly had severe mental problems. Dropped on the head at birth, for all I know. He was older than the rest, for a start, and he also had a criminal record and a history of violence. He had a habit of playing with this flick-knife. It used to
