Peter Robinson - Piece Of My Heart

When she’d pulled herself together, she laughed and said, “You must think I’m well daft, crying over some bloke I just met.”

“No, I don’t,” said Annie. “You felt close to him, and now he’s dead. That must be terrible. It must hurt.”

Kelly looked at her. “You understand, don’t you? You’re not like the rest. Not like that sourpuss you had with you last night.”

Annie smiled at the description of Banks, not one she would have used herself. “Oh, he’s all right,” she said. “He’s just been going through a rough time lately, too.”

“No, I mean it. You’re all right, you are. What’s it like, being a copper?”

“It has its moments,” Annie said.

“Do you think they’d have me, if I applied, like?”

“I’m sure it would be worth a try,” Annie said. “We’re always looking for bright, motivated people.”

“That’s me,” Kelly said with a crooked smile. “Bright and motivated. I’m sure my dad would approve.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Annie said, thinking of what Banks had told her about the way his parents reacted to his chosen profession. “But don’t let it stop you.”

Kelly frowned, then she said, “Look, I’ve got to get to work. I’m already late. CC’ll go spare.”

“Okay,” said Annie. “I think I’m just about done for now.”

“Can you give me a minute before we go?” said Kelly, pulling down the mirror and taking a small pink container from her handbag. “I’ve got to put my face on.”

“Of course.” Annie watched with amusement while Kelly applied eye shadow and mascara and various powders and potions to hide the acne and blotchiness, then drove down the hill to drop the girl at the Cross Keys before heading back up to see what was happening at the youth hostel.

10th-12th September, 1969

Over the next few days, Chadwick’s investigation proceeded with a frustrating lack of progress. The two essential questions – who was the victim, and who was with her at the time of her death – remained unanswered. Surely, Chadwick thought, someone, somewhere, must be missing her? Unless she was a runaway.

Things had been quiet on the home front since he and Yvonne had come to their compromise. He was convinced now that she had been at the Brimleigh Festival on Sunday night – she really wasn’t a very good liar – but there seemed little point in pursuing the issue now. It was over. The important thing was to try to head off anything along the same lines in the future, and Janet was right; he wouldn’t achieve that by ranting at her.

On Wednesday, though, Chadwick had paid a quick visit to the Grove, just to see the kind of place where his daughter was spending her time. It was a small, scruffy, old-fashioned pub by the canal, with one dingy room set aside for the young crowd. He checked with his friend Geoff Broome on the drugs squad and found it didn’t have a particularly bad reputation, which was good news. God only knew what Yvonne saw in the dump.

Dr. O’Neill – whose full postmortem report had yielded nothing to dispute the cause of death – had estimated the victim’s age at between seventeen and twenty-one, so it was conceivable that she had left home and was living by herself at the time of her murder. In which case, what about her friends, boyfriends, colleagues at work? Either they didn’t know what had happened, or they hadn’t missed her yet. Did she even have a job? Hippies didn’t like work, Chadwick knew that. Perhaps she was a student, or on holiday. One interesting point that Dr. O’Neill had included in his report was that there was a parturition scar on the pelvic bone, which meant that she had given birth to a baby.

DC Bradley had viewed all the television footage of the festival and spoken with newspaper reporters who had attended the event. He had learned precisely nothing. The victim was nowhere to be seen on the film, which more often than not panned over a sea of young idealistic faces, and cut back and forth from the gymnastic displays of the bands onstage to close-shot interviews with individual musicians and revelers. Perhaps it might all be of some use in the future, when they had a suspect or needed to pick someone out of the crowd, but for the moment it was useless.

Bradley had also contacted the festival’s press officer, Mick Lawton, and made a start phoning the photographers. Most were cooperative, had no objection to the police looking at their photographs and would be happy to send prints. After all, they had been taken for public consumption in the first place. What a difference it was from asking reporters to name sources.

The experts were still combing the area where the victim had been killed and the spot she had been moved to, collecting all the trace evidence for later analysis. If nothing else, it might provide useful forensic evidence in a trial. The lab had already reported back on the painted cornflower on the victim’s cheek, informing Chadwick that it was simple greasepaint, available in any number of outlets. The flower was still one small detail the police had not yet made public.

When it came to questioning the stars themselves, Enderby’s original doubts proved to be remarkably prophetic. It got done, mostly, but in a perfunctory and unsatisfactory way as far as Chadwick was concerned, usually by the local forces who had only minimal briefing in the case. There was more than one provincial DI just dying to have a crack at his local rock star, bring in the dogs and the drugs search team, despite the fiasco of the Rolling Stones bust a couple of years ago, but asking a few questions about a poxy festival up north hardly excited anyone’s interest. These long-haired idiots might be stoned and anarchic, the thinking mostly went, but they’re hardly likely to be bloody murderers, are they?

Chadwick preferred to keep an open mind on the subject. He thought of the murders in Los Angeles, a story he had been following in the newspapers and on television, just like everyone else. According to the reports, someone had broken into a house in Benedict Canyon, cut the telephone wires and murdered five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, who had been eight and a half months pregnant at the time she was stabbed to death. Later that night, another house had been broken into and a wealthy couple had been killed in a similar way. There was much speculation about drug orgies, as the male victims had been wearing hippie-type clothing and drugs were found in one of their cars. There was also talk about a “ritualistic” aspect to the murders: the word PIG had been written in blood on the front door of Sharon Tate’s house, and DEATH TO PIGS had been written on the living room wall of the other house, also in blood, and HEALTHER SKELTER inside the fridge door, which the authorities took to be a misspelling of “Helter Skelter,” a Beatles song from The White Album . What little inside knowledge Chadwick had been able to pick up on the grapevine indicated that the police were looking for members of some obscure hippie cult.

It had not occurred to Chadwick that the crimes had anything in common with the Brimleigh Festival murder. Los Angeles was a long way from Yorkshire. Still, if people who listened to Beatles songs and called the police pigs could do something like that in Los Angeles, then why not in England?

Chadwick would have interviewed the musicians himself, but they lived as far afield as London, Buckinghamshire, Sussex, Ireland and Glasgow, some of them in small flats and bedsits, but a surprising number of them owned country estates with swimming pools or large detached houses in nice areas. He would have spent half his life on the motorway and the rest on country roads.