Peter Robinson - Piece Of My Heart

The air smelled of sandalwood incense, and there were posters on the walls: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, a creepy Salvador Dalí print and, even creepier, Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters. Sometimes, when she was smoking really good dope, Yvonne would lose herself in that one, the sleeping artist surrounded by creatures of the night.

Mostly, they all just sat around and talked about the terrible shape the world was in and how they hoped to change it, end the war in Vietnam, free the universities from the establishment and their professor lackeys, put a stop to imperialism and capitalist oppression. Yvonne couldn’t wait to go to university; as far as she was concerned, that was where life got really exciting, not like boring old school, where they still treated you like a kid and weren’t interested in what you thought about the world. At university you were a student, and you went to demos and things. Steve was a second-year English student, but the term wasn’t due to start for a couple of weeks yet. He’d told her he would get her into all the great concerts at the university refectory next term, and she could hardly wait. The Moody Blues were coming, and Family and Tyrannosaurus Rex. There were even rumors of the Who coming to record a live concert.

They had already seen a lot of great local gigs together that summer: Thunderclap Newman at the town hall; Pink Floyd, Colosseum and Eire Apparent at Selby Abbey. She regretted missing the Isle of Wight – Dylan had been there, after all – but her parents wouldn’t let her go that far. She had two years to wait to go to university, and she had to get good A levels. Right now, that didn’t look like a strong possibility, but she’d worry about that later; she had just started in the lower sixth, so there was plenty of time yet to catch up. After all, she had managed to get seven very good O levels.

She had to admit, as she grinned through the haze of smoke, that things were looking pretty good. Sunday had been great. They had gone to the Brimleigh Festival – she, Steve, Todd, Charlie and Jacqui – and they had stayed up all night on the field sharing joints, food and drink with their fellow revelers. Steve had dropped acid, but Yvonne hadn’t wanted to because there were too many people around and she worried about getting paranoid. But Steve had seemed okay, though she’d got worried at one time when he disappeared for more than an hour. When it was all over, they went to Springfield Mount for a while to come down with a couple of joints, and then she went home to get ready for school, narrowly avoiding bumping into her father.

She hadn’t dared tell her parents where she was going. Christ, why did she have to have a father who was a pig, for crying out loud? It just wasn’t fair. If she told her new friends what her old man did for a living, they’d drop her like a hot coal. And if it wasn’t for her parents she could have gone to Brimleigh on Saturday, too. Steve and the others had been there both nights. But if she’d done that, she realized, they wouldn’t let her out on Sunday.

They were sitting on the living room floor propped up against the sofa. Just her and Steve this time; the others were all out. Some of the people who came and went she wasn’t too sure about at all. One of them, Magic Jack, was scary with his beard and wild eyes, although she had never seen him behave in any other way than gently, but the most frightening of all – and thank God he didn’t turn up very often – was McGarrity, the mad poet.

There was something about McGarrity that really worried Yvonne. Older than the rest, he had a thin, lined parchment face and black eyes. He always wore a black hat and a matching cape, and he had a flick-knife with a tortoiseshell handle. He never really talked to anyone, never joined in the discussions. Sometimes he would pace up and down tapping the blade against his palm, muttering to himself, reciting poetry. T. S. Eliot mostly, “The Waste Land.” Yvonne only recognized it because Steve had lent her a copy to read not so long ago, and he had explained its meaning to her.

Some people found McGarrity okay, but he gave Yvonne the creeps. She had asked Steve once why they let him hang around, but all Steve had said was that McGarrity was harmless really; it was just that his mind had been damaged a bit by the electric shock treatment they’d given him at the mental home when he deserted from the army. Besides, if they wanted a free and open society, how could they justify excluding people? There wasn’t much to say after that, though Yvonne thought there were probably a few people they wouldn’t like to have in the house: her dad, for example. McGarrity had been at Brimleigh, too, but luckily he’d wandered off and left them alone.

Yvonne could feel Steve’s hand on her thigh, gently stroking, and she turned to smile at him. It was all right, really it was all right. Her parents didn’t know it, but she was on the pill, had been since she’d turned sixteen. It wasn’t easy to get, and there was no way she would have asked old Cuthbertson, the family doctor. But her friend Maggie had told her about a new family-planning clinic on Woodhouse Lane where they were very concerned about teenage pregnancies and very obliging if you said you were over the age of consent.

Steve kissed her and put his hand on her breast. The dope they were smoking wasn’t especially strong, but it heightened her sense of touch as it did her hearing, and she felt herself responding to his caresses, getting wet. He undid the buttons on her school blouse and then she felt his hand moving up over her bare thighs. Jimi Hendrix was singing “ 1983” when Steve and Yvonne toppled onto the floor, pulling at one another’s clothing.

Monday, 8th September, 1969

Chadwick leaned back against the cool tiles of the mortuary wall and watched Dr. O’Neill and his assistant at work under the bright light. Postmortems had never bothered him, and this one was no exception, even though the victim had reminded him earlier of Yvonne. Now she was just an unfortunate dead girl on the porcelain slab. Her life was gone, drained out of her, and all that remained were flesh, muscle, blood, bone and organs. And, possibly, clues.

The painted cornflower looked even more incongruous in this harsh steel-and-porcelain environment, blooming on her dead cheek. Chadwick found himself wondering, not for the first time, whether it had been painted by the girl herself, by a friend or by her killer. And if the latter, what was its significance?

Dr. O’Neill had carefully removed the bloody dress, after matching the holes in the material to the wounds, and set it aside with the sleeping bag for further forensic testing. So far they had discovered that the sleeping bag was a cheap popular brand sold mainly through Woolworth’s.

The doctor bent over the pale naked body to examine the stab wounds. There were five in all, he noted, and one had been so hard and gone so deep that it had bruised the surrounding skin. If the hilt of the knife had caused the bruising, as Dr. O’Neill believed it had, they were dealing with a single-edged four-inch blade. A very thin, stiletto-type blade, too, allowing that it was a bit bigger than the actual wounds, owing to the elasticity of the skin. One strong possibility, he suggested, was a flick-knife. They were illegal in Britain but easy enough to pick up on the Continent.

Judging by the angles of the wounds, Dr. O’Neill concluded that the victim had been stabbed by a strong left-handed person standing behind her. The complete lack of defense wounds on her hands indicated that she had been so taken by surprise that she had either died or gone into shock before she knew what was happening.

“She may not have seen her killer, then,” said Chadwick, “unless it was someone she knew well enough to let that close?”