Piece Of My Heart

alienating women he fancied.

The documentary went on to portray the band’s upward trajectory until their official retirement in 1994, with clips from the few reunion concerts they had performed since then, along with interviews from an older, chain- smoking, short-haired Tania, and a completely bald, bloated and ill-looking Adrian Pritchard. Reg Cooper and Terry Watson must have declined to be interviewed because they appeared only in the concert footage.

When the film came to a sequence about disagreements within the band, Banks noticed Brian tense a little. Since the investigation had taken him farther into the world of rock than he had ever been before, he had thought a lot about Brian and the life he was living. Not just drugs, but all the trappings and problems that fame brought with it. He thought of the great stars who had destroyed themselves at an early age through self-indulgence or despair: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Nick Drake, Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison… the list went on. Brian seemed all right, but he was hardly likely to tell his father if he had a drug problem, for example.

“Anything wrong?” Banks asked.

“Wrong? No. Why? What could be wrong?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that you haven’t talked about the band much.”

“That’s because there’s not much to say.”

“So things are going fine?”

Brian paused. “Well…”

“What is it?”

He turned to face Banks, who turned down the DVD volume a notch or two. “Denny’s getting weird, that’s all. If it gets much worse, we might have to get rid of him.”

Denny, Banks knew, was the band’s other guitarist/vocalist, and Brian’s songwriting partner.

“Get rid of him?”

“I don’t mean kill him. Honestly, Dad, sometimes I wonder about the effect your job has on you.”

So do I, Banks thought. But he also thought about killing off disruptive band members – Robin Merchant, for example – and how easy it would have been, just a gentle nudge in the direction of the swimming pool. Vic Greaves had been disruptive, too, but he had made his own voluntary exit. “Weird? How?” he asked.

“Ego, mostly. I mean he’s getting into really off-the-wall musical influences, like acid Celtic punk, and he’s trying to import it into our sound. If you challenge him on it, he gets all huffy and goes on about how it’s his band, how he brought us together and all that shit.”

“What do the others have to say about him?”

“Everybody’s sort of retreated into their own worlds. We’re not communicating very well. We’re going through the motions. There’s no talking to Denny. We can’t write together anymore.”

“What happens if he goes?”

Brian gestured toward the video. “We get someone else. But we’re not going pop.”

“You’re doing just fine as you are, aren’t you?”

“We are. I know. We’re selling more and more. People love our sound. It’s got an edge, but it’s accessible, you know. That’s the problem. Denny wants to change it, and thinks he’s got a right to do so.”

“What about your manager?”

“Geoff? Denny keeps sucking up to him.”

Banks immediately thought of Kev Templeton. “And how is Geoff dealing with that?”

Brian scratched his chin. “Come to think of it,” he said, “he’s getting sick of it. I think at first he liked it that someone in the band was giving him a lot of attention, not to mention telling tales out of school, but I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, it’s a weird thing, but eventually people get fed up with their toadies.”

From the mouths of babes, Banks thought, as a lightbulb went on in his brain. Though Brian was hardly a baby. It was as he had suspected. Templeton was digging his own grave. Nobody needed to do anything. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. Annie ought to appreciate that, too, Banks, thought, with her interests in Taoism and Zen. “Have drugs got anything to do with it?” he asked.

Brian looked at him. “Drugs? No. If you mean have I ever done any drugs, then the answer’s yes. I’ve smoked dope and taken E. I took speed once, but when I came down I was depressed for a week, so I’ve never touched it since. Nothing stronger. And as it happens, I still prefer lager. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Banks. “It’s good of you to be so frank, but I was thinking more about the others.”

Brian smiled. “Now I see how you trick confessions out of people. Anyway, the answer’s still no. Believe it or not, we’re a pretty straight band.”

“So what next?” Banks asked.

Brian shrugged. “Dunno. Geoff said we all needed to take a breather, we’d been working so hard in the studio and on tour. When we get back… we’ll see. Either Denny will have changed his ideas or he won’t.”

“What do you predict?”

“That he won’t.”

“And then?”

“He’ll have to go.”

“Does that worry you?”

“A bit. Not too much, though. I mean, they did all right, didn’t they?” The Mad Hatters were performing their jaunty, rocking 1983 number one hit, “Young at Heart.” “The band will survive. It’s more the lack of communication that upsets me. I mean, Denny was a mate, and now I can’t talk to him.”

“Losing friends is always sad,” said Banks, aware of how pathetic and pointless that observation was. “It’s just one of those things, though. When you first get together with someone it’s a great adventure, finding out stuff you’ve got in common. You know, places you love, music, books. Then the more you get to know them, the more you start to see other things.”

“Yeah, like a whingeing, lying, manipulative bastard,” said Brian. Then he laughed and shook his empty can. “Want another glass of plonk?” he asked Banks, whose glass was also empty.

“Sure, why not?” said Banks, and he watched the lovely Tania sway in pastel blue diaphanous robes that flowed around her like water while Brian got the drinks.

“There is one thing I’d like to know,” he said, after a sip of Amarone. Plonk, indeed.

“What’s that?” Brian asked.

“Just what the hell does acid Celtic punk sound like?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Annie jotted something down, then turned back to the computer monitor and scrolled. It was Monday morning. On Sunday, most of the team had taken a well-deserved day off, their first since Nick Barber’s murder almost two weeks ago. Annie had spent the morning doing household chores, the afternoon on the Mad Hatters web site and the evening enjoying that long bath and the trashy magazines she had been promising herself. At lunchtime, she had gone out with Banks, Brian and Emilia to the Bridge in Grinton. Emilia had been absolutely charming, and Annie had been secretly awestruck to meet an up-and-coming actress. More so than by meeting Banks’s rock star son, whom she had met before, though Brian had also, in his way, been charming and far less full of himself than she remembered from previous occasions they had met. He seemed to have matured and become comfortable with his success, no longer the young tearaway with something to prove.

The coffee at her right hand was lukewarm, and she made a face when she took a sip. There was plenty of activity around her in the squad room, but she was still on the Web, oblivious to most of it as she felt herself finally zooming in on the mystery of the numbers in the back of Nick Barber’s book.

It wasn’t such an esoteric solution after all, she realized with a sense of disappointment. It didn’t suddenly make everything clear and solve the case, and it was nothing she wouldn’t have expected him to make a note of anyway.

She hadn’t found everything she wanted at the official Mad Hatters web site, but she had found links there that took her to more obscure fan sites, as Nick Barber must have done in Eastvale Computes. But all the owner had