1972.”
“That seems a rather sudden decline,” Banks said. “Any speculation as to what it was?”
“Well, it wasn’t murder, if that’s what you’re thinking. He had a history of heart problems, hereditary, apparently, which had gone untreated, perhaps even unnoticed, for years. He died in his sleep of a heart attack. But you have to remember, this is just from the files and the memory of a couple of old men I managed to track down. And some of the old information is impossible to locate. We moved here from Brotherton House in 1976, which was well before my time, and inevitably stuff went missing in the move, so your guess is as good as mine as to the rest.”
Simon Bradley had told Banks he’d heard Chadwick wasn’t in good health, but Banks hadn’t realized things were that bad. Could there have been anything suspicious about his death? First Linda Lofthouse, then Robin Merchant, then Stanley Chadwick? Banks couldn’t imagine what linked them to one another. Chadwick had investigated the Lofthouse case, but had had nothing to do with Merchant’s drowning. He had, however, met the Mad Hatters at Swainsview Lodge, and Vic Greaves was Linda Lofthouse’s cousin. There had to be something he was missing. Maybe Chadwick’s daughter, Yvonne, would help, if he could find her.
They turned down Briggate, a pedestrian precinct. There were plenty of shoppers in evidence, many of them young people, teenage girls pushing prams, the boys with them looking too young and inexperienced to be fathers. Many of the girls looked too young to be mothers, too, but Banks knew damn well they weren’t merely helping out their big sisters. Teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were at appallingly high rates.
Because he still had Linda Lofthouse and Nick Barber on his mind, Banks thought back to the sixties, to what the media had dubbed the “sexual revolution.” True, the pill had made it possible for women to have sex without fear of pregnancy, but it had also left them with little or no excuse
But there were plenty of unwanted pregnancies back then, too, Banks remembered, as not all girls were on the pill, or willing to have abortions, certainly in the provinces. Linda Lofthouse had been one of them, and Norma Coulton, just down the street from where Banks lived, was another. Banks remembered the gossip and the dirty looks she got when she walked into the newsagent’s. He wondered what had happened to her and her child. At least he knew what had happened to Linda Lofthouse’s son; he had met the same fate as his mother.
“Any idea what happened to Chadwick’s family?” he asked.
“According to what I could find out, he had a wife called Janet and a daughter called Yvonne. Both survived him, but nobody’s kept tabs on them. I don’t suppose it would be too difficult to track them down. Pensions or Human Resources might be able to help.”
“Do what you can,” said Banks. “I appreciate it. And I’ll put Winsome on it at our end. She’s good at that sort of thing. The daughter may have married, changed her name, of course, but we’ll give it a try: electoral rolls, DVLA, PNC and the rest. Who knows, we might get lucky before we have to resort to more time consuming methods.”
They passed a thin bearded young man selling the
“It’s a fact of the times here, I’m afraid,” said Blackstone.
Banks nodded. What bothered him most was that the officers looked only about fifteen.
“Sorry I’m not being a lot of help,” Blackstone went on.
“Nonsense,” said Banks. “You’re helping me fill in the picture, and that’s all I need right now. I know I’ll have to read the files and the trial transcripts soon, but I keep putting it off because those things bore me so much.”
“You can do that in my office after we’ve had a bite to eat. I have to go out. I know what you mean, though. I’d rather curl up with a good Flash-man or Sharpe, myself.” Blackstone stopped at the end of an alley. “Let’s try the Ship this time. Whitelocks is always too damned crowded these days, and they’ve changed the menu. It’s getting too trendy. And somehow I don’t see you sitting out in the Victoria Quarter at the Harvey Nichols cafe eating a garlic-and-Brie frittata.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Banks. “You’d be surprised. I scrub up quite nicely, and I don’t mind a bit of foreign grub every now and then. But the Ship sounds fine.”
They ordered pints of Tetley’s, and Banks chose the giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausages and gravy and sat down in the dim brass and dark wood interior. Blackstone stuck with his beer.
Banks told Blackstone about their troublesome new superintendent and the fact that Templeton might be bringing in just too many apples for the teacher. Then he chatted about Brian and his new girlfriend Emilia turning up till their food came and they got back to Stanley Chadwick and Linda Lofthouse.
“Do you think I’m tilting at windmills, Ken?” Banks asked.
“It wouldn’t be the first time, but I don’t have enough to go on to advise you on that score. Usually your windmills turn out to be all too human. Explain your reasoning.”
Banks sipped some beer, trying to put his thoughts in order. It was a useful, if difficult, exercise. “There isn’t much, really,” he said. “Superintendent Gervaise thinks the past is over and the guilty have been punished, but I’m not so sure. It’s not that I think Vic Greaves is a killer because he has mental problems. Christ, it might even be Chris Adams, for all I know. He doesn’t live that far away. Or even Tania Hutchison. It’s not as if Oxfordshire’s on the moon, either. I just think that if Nick Barber was as good and as thorough a music journalist as everyone says he was, then he might have struck a nerve, and Vic Greaves is one of the few people he had tried to speak to about the story before his murder. I’ve also just discovered that Nick was Linda Lofthouse’s son, adopted at birth by the Barbers, and that he found out who his birth mother was about five years ago. Barber was a journalist, and I think he simply tried to find out as much about her and her times as he could because he was already interested in the music and the period. One thing he found out was that Vic Greaves was her cousin. Greaves also lives only walking distance away from Barber’s rented cottage, and someone saw a figure running around at the time of the murder. The only things I can find in the past that cast any sort of suspicions on Greaves and the others are the murder of Linda Lofthouse, because she was backstage at the Brimleigh Festival with Tania Hutchison, and she was Greaves’s cousin, and the drowning of the Mad Hatters’ bassist, Robin Merchant, when Greaves, Adams and Tania Hutchison were all present at Swainsview Lodge. And they’re both closed cases.”
“Linda Lofthouse’s murderer was caught, and Merchant’s drowning was ruled death by misadventure, right?”
“Right. And Linda’s killer was stabbed in jail, so it’s not as if we can ask him to clear anything up for us. Sounds as if he was deranged in the first place.”
“But ruling out the angry husband or passing tramp theory, that’s the default line of inquiry?”
“Pretty much so. Chris Adams said Barber had a coke habit, but we can’t find any evidence of that. If he did, it obviously wasn’t big-time.”
“Have you got Barber’s phone records yet?”
“We’re working on it, but we don’t expect too much there.”
“Why not?”
“There was no landline at the cottage where he was staying, and he was out of mobile range. If he needed to phone anyone he’d have had to use the public telephone box, either in Fordham or in Eastvale.”
“What about Internet access? You’d think a savvy music journalist would be all wired up for that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?”
“Not if he didn’t have a phone line, or even wireless access. Blackberry or Bluetooth, or whatever it is.”
“Aren’t there any Internet cafes in Eastvale?”
Banks glanced at Blackstone, ate another mouthful of sausage and washed it down with a swig of beer. “Good point, Ken. Apart from the library, which is as slow as a horse and cart, there’s a computer shop in the market square, Eastvale Computes, and I suppose we could check there. Problem is, the owner’s only got two computers available to the public, and I should imagine the histories get wiped pretty often. If Nick Barber used either of them, it’d have been a couple of weeks ago, and all traces would be gone by now. It’s still worth a try, though.”
“So what next?”
“Well,” said Banks, “there are a few more people to talk to, starting with Tania Hutchison and Chadwick’s daughter, Yvonne, when we find her, but for the moment, I’ve got a CD collection with a lot of holes in it, and
