Peter Robinson - Piece Of My Heart

“Good Lord. Yes, of course I do.”

“In September 1969, there was a pop festival in North Yorkshire at Brimleigh Glen. Remember? You would have been about fifteen.”

Yvonne clapped her hands together. “Sixteen. I was there! I wasn’t supposed to be, but I was. My father was terribly strict. He would never have let me go if I’d told him.”

“You might also remember then that a young girl was found dead when the festival was over. Her name was Linda Lofthouse.”

“Of course I remember. It was my father’s case. He solved it.”

“Yes. A man called McGarrity.”

Annie noticed Yvonne give a little shiver at the name, and an expression of distaste flitted across her features. “Did you know him?” she asked, before the moment was lost.

Yvonne flushed. “McGarrity? How could I?”

She was a poor liar, Annie thought. “I don’t know. You just seemed to react to the name, that’s all.”

“Dad told me about him, of course. He sounded like a terrible person.”

“Look, Yvonne,” Annie persisted, “I get the feeling there’s a bit more to it than that. I know it was a long time ago, but if you know anything that might help us, then you should let us know.”

“How could knowing about back then possibly help you now?”

“Because,” said Banks, “we think the cases might be linked. Nick Barber was Linda Lofthouse’s son. She gave him up for adoption, but he found out who his mother was and what happened to her. That gave him a special interest in the Mad Hatters and the McGarrity case. We think that Nick had stumbled across something to do with his mother’s murder, and that he was killed for it. Which means that we have to look very closely at what happened at Brimleigh and afterward. Someone who worked on the case with your father let slip that McGarrity had possibly terrorized another girl, but that never came up at the trial, or in the case notes. We also heard that Mr. Chadwick had a bit of trouble with his daughter, that she was perhaps running with a wild crowd, but we couldn’t get anything more specific than that. It might be nothing, and I might be wrong, but you are that daughter, and if you do know something, anything at all, please tell us and let us be the judges.”

Yvonne said nothing for a few moments. Annie could hear a radio in the back of the house, probably the kitchen; talking, not music. Yvonne chewed on her lip and stared over their heads at one of the bookcases.

“Yvonne,” Annie said. “If there’s anything we don’t know about, you should tell us. It can’t possibly harm you. Not now.”

“But it was all so long ago,” Yvonne said. “God, I was such an idiot. An arrogant, selfish, stupid idiot.”

“That would describe quite a lot of sixteen-year-olds,” Annie said.

It broke the ice a little, and Yvonne managed a polite laugh. “I suppose so,” she said. Then she sighed. “I used to run with a wild crowd, it’s true,” she said. “Well, not really wild, but different. Hippies, you’d call them. The kind of people my father hated. He’d go on about why he fought the war for lazy, cowardly sods like that. But they were harmless, really. Well, most of them.”

“And McGarrity?”

“McGarrity was a sort of hanger-on, older, not really part of the crowd, but they couldn’t summon the energy or find a reason to kick him out, so he drifted from place to place, sleeping on floors and in empty beds. Nobody really liked him. He was weird.”

“And he had a knife.”

“Yes. A flick-knife with a tortoiseshell handle. Nasty thing. Of course he said he lost it, but…”

“But the police found it in one of the houses,” said Banks. “Your father found it.”

“Yes.” Yvonne squinted at Banks. “You seem to know plenty about this already.”

“It’s my job. I read the trial transcripts, but they didn’t tell me about the girl he terrorized, the one your father asked him about during the interrogation.”

“I suppose not.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Me?”

“You knew McGarrity. Something happened. How else could you explain your father’s zeal in pursuing him or his reticence to pursue the issue? He abandoned all his other leads and concentrated on McGarrity. Now I’d say that was a little personal, wouldn’t you?”

“Okay, I told him,” Yvonne said. “McGarrity frightened me. We were alone together in the front room at Springfield Mount, and he frightened me.”

“What did he do?”

“It wasn’t so much anything he did, just the way he talked, looked at me, grabbed me.”

“He grabbed you?”

“My arm. Just a bruise. And he touched my cheek. It made me cringe. Mostly it was the things he said, though. He wanted to talk about Linda, and when that got him all excited he started going on about those murders in Los Angeles. We didn’t know who did it then – Manson and his family – but we knew the people had been butchered and someone had written PIGGIES on the walls in blood. He found all that exciting. And he said… he…”

“Go on, Yvonne,” Annie urged her.

Yvonne looked at her as she answered. “He said he’d, you know, watched me with my boyfriend, and that now it was going to be his turn.”

“So he threatened to rape you?” Annie said.

“That’s what I thought. That’s what I was scared of.”

“Did he have his knife?” Banks asked.

“I didn’t see it.”

“What did he say about Linda Lofthouse?”

“Just how pretty she was, and how it was sad that she had to die, but that it was an absurd and arbitrary world.”

“Is that all?”

“Then he talked about the Manson murders and asked me if I would like to do something like that.”

“What happened next?”

“I made a break for it and ran for my life. He was pacing, spouting gibberish.”

“And then what?”

“I told my father. He was furious.”

“I can understand that,” said Banks. “I have a daughter myself, and I’d feel exactly the same way. What happened next?”

“The police raided Springfield Mount and a couple of other hippie pads that night. They gave everyone a hard time, brought some drugs charges against them, but it was McGarrity they really wanted. He’d been at the festival, you see, at Brimleigh, and plenty of people had seen him wandering around near the edge of the woods with his flick-knife.”

“Did you think he did it?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. I never really questioned it.”

“Yet he went on to deny it, said he was framed.”

“Yes, but all criminals do that, don’t they? That’s what my father told me.”

“It’s pretty common,” said Banks.

“So there. Look, what is this all about? He’s not due to be released, is he?”

“You need have no worries on that score. He died in prison.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t say I’m heartbroken.”

“What happened after the arrest and everything?”

Yvonne shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe what an absolute idiot I was. My father let my boyfriend at Springfield Mount know that he was my father and told him to stay away from me. Steve, his name was. What an awful self-obsessed little prick. But a good-looking one, as I remember.”

“I’ve known one or two like that myself,” said Annie.

Banks glanced at her, as if to say, “We’ll get back to that later.”

“Anyway,” Yvonne went on, “it was the usual story. I thought he loved me, but he just wanted me out of the way. It was so embarrassing. You know, it’s funny, but the thing I remember most about the room is the Goya print on the wall. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The one of the sleeping man surrounded by owls, bats and cats. It used to scare me and fascinate me at the same time, if you know what I mean.”