Piece Of My Heart

CHAPTER TEN

Tuesday, 16th September, 1969

It was raining when Chadwick and Enderby paid their visit to Bayswater Terrace, and the rows of slate-roofed, redbrick houses looked suitably gloomy. DI Broome had found the number of the house they wanted easily enough. It wasn’t known as a drug house especially, though Broome had no doubt that drugs were consumed there, but the police had been looking for a dealer who had slipped through their net a few months ago, and they had visited all his possible known haunts, including this house, rented by a Dennis Nokes since early 1967. According to their information, the occupancy turnover was pretty high and included students, hippies and general layabouts. Nokes described himself as a student and a musician, but as far as anyone knew, he was on the dole.

After the previous day’s exhausting session with the Mad Hatters, Chadwick wasn’t looking forward to the interview. He also hadn’t been certain when was the best time to call to find somebody home. In the end he decided it didn’t matter, so they went around lunchtime. Either these people didn’t work or they were students, and the university term hadn’t started yet, so the odds were that someone would be there at almost any time of the day or night.

Chadwick could hear the sound of a solo acoustic guitar coming from inside the house, which was encouraging. It stopped when Enderby knocked on the door, and they could hear someone shuffling down the hall. It turned out to be a young girl, surely no older than Yvonne, wearing only a long grubby white T-shirt with a target on the front, which hardly covered her bare thighs. The top did nothing much to hide her breasts, either, as she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Police,” Enderby said. They showed their warrant cards and introduced themselves.

She didn’t looked scared or nervous, merely puzzled. “Police? Yeah. Right. Okay. Come in, then.” And she stood aside. When they were all inside the hall, she reached her arms in the air, pulling the T-shirt up even higher, and yawned. As he averted his gaze, Chadwick could see that Enderby made no effort to do likewise, that he was gazing with open admiration at her exposed thighs and pubic hair.

“You woke me up,” the girl said. “I was having a nice dream.”

“Who is it, Julie?” came a voice from upstairs, followed by a young man peering down from the landing, a guitar in his hand.

“Police,” said Julie.

“Okay, right, just a minute.” There was a short pause while the young man disappeared back into his room, then visited the toilet. Chadwick thought he could hear the sound of a few quids’ worth of marijuana flushing down the bowl. If he’d been drugs squad, the young lad wouldn’t have stood a chance. When he came down he was without his guitar. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Are you Dennis Nokes?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to talk to you. Is there somewhere we can go?”

Nokes gestured toward the rear. “Kitchen. Julie’s crashing in the front room. Go back to bed, Julie. It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

Chadwick could just about make out a sleeping bag, or a pile of blankets, on the floor before the door closed.

The kitchen was cleaner than Chadwick would have expected, but Janet would definitely have turned her nose up and gone at it with the Ajax and Domestos. The chairs were covered with some sort of red plastic material that had cracked and lined like parchment over time, and the table with a red-and-white-checked oilcloth, and on it lay a magazine called Oz with a photograph of a white man embracing a naked black man on the cover. Beside that stood an open jar of orange marmalade, rim encrusted with dried syrup, a half-wrapped slab of Lurpak butter and some bread crumbs. Nearby were a bottle of Camp coffee, salt and pepper shakers, a packet of Cocoa Krispies and a half-empty bottle of milk. Not to mention the overflowing ashtray, to which Dennis Nokes, by the looks of it, was soon to add.

They sat down and Enderby took out his notebook and pen.

“It’s only tobacco,” Nokes said as he rolled a cigarette. He had a tangle of curly dark hair and finely chiseled, almost pixieish, features, and he wore an open-necked blue shirt with jeans and sandals. A necklace of tiny different-colored beads hung around his neck, and a silver bracelet engraved with various occult symbols encircled his left wrist.

“It had better be,” Chadwick said. “Pity you had to flush everything you had down the toilet when that’s not what I came about.”

It only lasted a moment, but Chadwick noticed the look of annoyance that flashed across Nokes’s features before the practiced shrug. “I’ve got nothing to hide from the fuzz.”

“While we’re talking,” said Chadwick, “let’s agree on a few ground rules. It’s not fuzz, or pigs, it’s DI Chadwick and DS Enderby. Okay?”

“Whatever you want,” Nokes agreed, lighting the cigarette.

“Right. I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way. Now let’s get to the real subject of our visit: Linda Lofthouse.”

“Linda?”

“Yes. I assume you’ve heard the news?”

“Bummer, man,” said Nokes. “I was trying to write a song for her when you guys arrived. It’s okay, I mean, I’m not blaming you for interrupting me or anything. It wasn’t going very well.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Chadwick. “I don’t suppose you thought for a moment to come forward with information?”

“Why, man? I haven’t seen Linda in a while.”

“When was the last time?”

“Summer. July, I think. Same time Rick was up.”

“Rick?”

“Rick Hayes, man. He put on the festival.”

“Was he with Linda Lofthouse in July?”

“Not with her, just here at the same time.”

“Did they know one another well?”

“They’d met, I think. Linda’s cousin’s Vic Greaves, you know, the keyboard player in the Mad Hatters, and Rick promoted some of their gigs in London.”

“Were they going out together?”

“No way, man.” Nokes laughed. “Linda and Rick? You must be joking. She was way out of his league.”

“I thought he made plenty of money from the concerts.”

“It’s not about money, man. Is that all you people ever think of?”

“So what was it about?”

“It was a spiritual thing. Linda was an old soul. Spiritually she was lifetimes ahead of Rick.”

“I see,” said Chadwick. “But they were here at the same time?”

“Yes. That time. Linda crashed here but Rick was staying in some hotel in town. Didn’t stop him trying to pick up some bird to take back with him, but he ended up going alone.”

“Why was he here?”

“I used to know him a few years ago, when I lived in London. We’re sort of old mates, I suppose. Anyway, he’d come up to check out something at Brimleigh Glen for the festival, so he dropped by to see me.”

Chadwick filed all that information away for his next talk with Rick Hayes, who was proving to be even more of a liar than he had at first appeared to be. “You say Linda hasn’t been here since July?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you seen her since then?”

“No.”

“Were you at Brimleigh?”

“Of course. Rick scored us some free tickets.”

“Did you see her there?”

“No.”

“Where were you between one and one-twenty on Sunday night?”

“How do you expect me to remember that?”

“Led Zeppelin had just started, if that refreshes your memory.”

“Yeah, right. I sat through the whole set in the same place. We were in the middle, quite near the front. We got there early on Friday and staked out a good space.”

“Who was with you?”

Nokes nodded toward the front room. “Julie there, and the others from the house. There were five of us in all.”

“I’ll need names.”

“Sure. There was me, Julie, Martin, Rob and Cathy.”

“Full names, please, sir,” DS Enderby interrupted. Nokes gave him a pitying look and told him.

“Are any of the others at home now?” Chadwick asked.

“Only Julie.”

“We’ll send someone over later to take statements. Now about Linda. Did she stay here around the time of the festival?”

“No. She knows she’s welcome here anytime she wants, man. She doesn’t have to ask, just turn up. But I don’t know where she was staying. Maybe in a tent or out on the field or something. Maybe she was with someone. Maybe they had a car. I don’t know, man. All I know is this is freaking me out.”

“Stay calm, Mr. Nokes. Try a few deep breaths. I hear it works wonders.”

Nokes glared at him. “You’re taking the piss.”

“Not at all.”

“This is very upsetting.”

“What? That Linda was murdered or that you’re being questioned?”

Nokes ran the end of his index finger over some grains of salt on the tablecloth. “All of it, man. It’s just so heavy. You’re laying a real trip on us, and you’re way off course. We’re into making love, not killing.”

His whiny voice was starting to grate on Chadwick. “Tell me about Linda.”

“What about her?”

“When did you first meet?”

“Couple of years ago. Not long after I moved here, May, June 1967, around then.”

“And you came up from London?”

“Yeah. I was living down there until early ’67. I’d seen the sort of stuff that was happening, and thought I could make some of it happen up here. Those were really exciting times – great music, poetry readings, light shows, happenings. Revolution was in the air, man.”

“Back to Linda. How did you meet?”

“In town, in a record shop. We were both looking through the folk section, and we just got talking. She was so alone. I mean, she was changing, but she didn’t know it, trying to find herself, didn’t know how to go about it. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Know what I mean?”

“So you helped her to find herself?”

“I invited her around here from time to time. I gave her a few books – Leary, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts. Played music for her. We talked a lot.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No way. She was six months pregnant.”

“Drugs.”

“Of course not.”

“How long did she stay here?”

“Not very long. After she’d had the baby she came here for a while, maybe a month or two the winter of ’67, then she went to London early in ’68. After that she’d crash here when she was up visiting.”

“What did she do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Work? Earn a living? Did she have a job?”

“Oh, that shit. Well, she didn’t when I first met her, of course. She was still living with her parents. Then the baby… Anyway, she made really beautiful jewelry, but I don’t think she got much money for it. Gave most of it away. Clothes, too. She could fix anything, and make a shirt from any old scraps of material. She was into fashion, too, did some of her own designs.”

“So how did she make money?”

“She worked in a shop. Biba. It’s pretty well known. They just moved to Kensington High Street. Do a lot of ’30s nostalgia stuff. You know the sort of thing: all floppy hats, ostrich feathers and long satin dresses in plum and pink.”

“Do you happen to know her address in London?”

Nokes gave him an address in Notting Hill.

“Did she live alone or share?”

“Alone. But she had a good friend living in the same house, across the hall. Came up here with Linda once or twice. American girl. Her name’s Tania Hutchison.”

“What does she look like?”

“Like a dream. I mean, she’s like a negative image of Linda, man, but just as beautiful in her own way. She’s got long dark hair, really long, you know. And she has a dark complexion, like she’s half Mexican or something. And white teeth. But all Americans have white teeth, don’t they?”

It sounded like the girl Robin Merchant had described. So what, if anything, did this Tania Hutchison have to do with Linda Lofthouse’s murder?

There was nothing more to be got from Dennis Nokes, so Chadwick gave Enderby the signal to wrap up the interview. He would send someone to talk to the others later. He didn’t really think that Nokes and his pals had had anything to do with Linda Lofthouse’s murder, but now he at least knew where she had been living, and this Tania woman might be able to tell him something about Linda’s recent life. And death.

Before heading to interview Vic Greaves the following day, Banks first called at Swainsview Lodge out of curiosity, to soak up the atmosphere. He got the keys from the estate agent, who told him they had kept the place locked up tight since there had been reports from local farmers of someone breaking in. She thought it was probably just kids, but the last thing they needed, she said, was squatters or travelers taking occupation of the place.

Entering the cold and drafty hallway, Banks felt as if he were entering one of those creepy mansions from the old Roger Corman films of Poe stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, or something. The long wainscoted hallway had paneled doors opening off each side, and there were obvious spaces on the walls where paintings had once hung. Banks tried some of the doors and found they opened to empty rooms in varied states of disrepair. Bits of ceiling had crumbled, and a veneer of plaster dust lay over everything. Banks kicked clouds of it up as he walked, and it made him cough, made his mouth dry.

At the end of the hall a moth-eaten, dusty old curtain covered French windows. Banks fiddled for the key and opened them. They led out to a broad empty balcony. Banks walked out and leaned against the cool stone of the balustrade to admire the view. Below him lay the empty granite-and-marble swimming pool, its dark bottom clogged with weeds, lichen and rubbish. Lower down the hillside the trees on the banks of the river Swain were red and brown and yellow. Some of the leaves blew off and swirled in the wind as Banks watched. Sheep grazed in the fields of the opposite daleside, dots of white on green among the irregular patterns of drystone walls. The clouds were so low, they grazed the limestone outcrops along the top and shrouded the upper moorland in mist.

Wrapping his arms around himself against the autumn chill, Banks went back inside the building and headed downstairs to the lower level, where he found himself in a cavernous room that he guessed must have been used as the recording studio. So this was where the Mad Hatters had recorded their breakthrough second album during the winter of 1969-1970, and several others over the years. There was no equipment left, of course, but there were still a few strips of wire lying around, along with a broken drumstick, and what looked like a guitar string. Banks strained but could hear no echoes of events or music long past.

He unlocked the doors and walked out to the edge of the swimming pool. There was broken glass on the courtyard and bottles and cans at the bottom of the pool, where it sloped down to the deep end. Banks saw what the estate agent meant, and guessed that local kids must have climbed the wall and had a party. He wondered if they knew the house’s history. Maybe they were celebrating Robin Merchant the way the kids flocked to Jim Morrison’s tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Banks doubted it. He thought he heard a sound behind him, in the abandoned recording studio, and turned in time to see a mouse skitter through the dust.

He tried to imagine the scene on that summer night thirty-five years ago. There would have been music, and probably lights strung up outside, around the pool. Incense. Drugs, of course, and alcohol, too. By the early seventies, booze was coming back in fashion among the younger generation. There would also have been girls, half undressed or more, perhaps, laughing, dancing, making love. And when everyone was sated, Robin Merchant had… well, what had happened? Banks didn’t know yet. Kev Templeton was still in the basement of Western Area Headquarters going through the archives.

A gust of wind rattled the open door and Banks went back inside. There was nothing for him here except ghosts. Lord Jessop was dead of AIDS, poor sod, and Robin Merchant had drowned in the swimming pool. The rest of the Mad Hatters were still very much alive, though, and Vic Greaves was around somewhere. If he would talk. If he could talk. Banks didn’t know exactly what the official diagnosis was, only that everyone claimed he’d taken too much acid and gone over the top. Well, in a short while, with a little skill and a little luck, he would find out.

Wednesday, 17th September, 1969

It was a long time since Chadwick had walked along the Portobello Road. Wartime, in fact, one of the times he had been back on leave between assignments. He was sure the street had been narrower then. And there had been sandbags, blackout curtains, empty shop windows, rubble from bomb damage, the smell of ash, fractured gas lines and sewage pipes. Now the biggest mess was caused by construction on the Westway, an overhead motorway that was almost completed, and most of the smells were exotic spices that took him back to his days in India and Burma.

Chadwick had taken the afternoon train down to King’s Cross, a journey of about five hours. Now it was early evening. The market had closed for the day; the stallholders had packed up their wares and gone to one of the many local pubs. Outside the Duke of Wellington a fire-eater entertained a small crowd. The atmosphere was lively, the people young and colorful in brightly printed fabrics, flared jeans with flowers embroidered on them, or gold lamé caftans. Some of the girls were wearing old-fashioned wide-brimmed hats and long dresses trailing around their ankles. There were quite a few West Indians wandering the street, too, some also in bright clothes, with beards and fuzzy hairdos. Chadwick was sure he could smell marijuana in the air. He was also sure he looked quite out of place in his navy blue suit, although there were one or two business types mingling with the crowds.

According to his map, there were quicker ways of getting to Powis Terrace than from the Notting Hill Underground station, but out of interest he had wanted to wander up and down Portobello Road. He had heard so much about it, from the Notting Hill race riots of over ten years ago to the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, connected to both the Kray twins and the Profumo affair of 1963. The area had history.

Now the street was full of chic boutiques, hairdressers and antique shops with bright-painted facades. There was even a local fleapit called the Electric Cinema, showing a double bill of Easy Rider and Girl on a Motorcycle. One shop, Alice’s Antiques, sold Edwardian policemen’s capes, and for a moment Chadwick was tempted to buy one. But he knew he wouldn’t wear it; it would just hang at the back of his wardrobe until the moths got at it.

Chadwick turned down Colville Terrace and finally found the street he was looking for. At the end of the block someone had drawn graffiti depicting Che Guevara, and underneath the bearded face and beret were the words LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION in red paint, imitating dripping blood. The terraced houses, once majestic four-story Georgian-style stucco, were now dirty white, with stained and graffiti-covered facades – THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM and CRIME IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF SENSUALITY. Rubbish littered the street. Each house had a low black metal railing and gate, which led down murky stone steps to the basement flat. The broad stairs leading up to the front door were flanked by two columns supporting a portico. Most of the doors looked badly in need of a paint job. Chadwick had heard that the houses were all divided into a warren of bedsits.

There were several names listed beside the intercom at the house he wanted. Chadwick had timed his visit for early evening, thinking that might be the best time to find Tania Hutchison at home. The problem was that he didn’t want her to be warned of his visit. If she had had anything to do with Linda’s murder, then there was a chance she would scarper the minute she heard his voice. He needed another way in.

Tania’s flat, he noted, was number eight. He wondered how security-conscious the other tenants were. If drugs were involved, probably very, though if someone was under the influence… He decided to start with the ground floor and after getting no answer went on up the list. Finally he was rewarded by a bad connection with an incomprehensible young man in flat five, who actually buzzed the door open.

The smell of cats’ piss and onions was almost overwhelming; the floor was covered with drab cracked lino and the stair carpet was threadbare. If it had had a pattern once, it was indiscernible from the dull gray background now. The walls were also bare, apart from a few telephone numbers scribbled around the shared pay phone. Out of habit, Chadwick made a note of them.

Now he just had to find number eight. It wasn’t on the ground floor, nor the first, but on the second floor, facing the front. That landing had another shared pay phone, and again Chadwick copied down the numbers. It smelled a little better up here, mostly due to the burning incense coming from one of the rooms, but the bulb was bare and cast a thankfully weak light on the shabby decor. Chadwick could hear soft music coming from inside number eight, guitars and flutes and some sort of oriental percussion. A good sign.

He tapped on the door. A few moments later, it opened on the chain. He wasn’t in yet, but he was close. “Are you Tania Hutchison?” he asked.

“I’m Tania,” she said. “Who wants to know?”

Chadwick thought he detected an American accent. Only a thin strip of her face showed, but he could see what Dennis Nokes had meant about her good looks. “I’m Detective Inspector Chadwick,” he said, holding up his warrant card. “It’s about Linda Lofthouse.”

“Linda? Of course.”

“Do you mind if I come in?”

She looked at him for a moment – he could see only one eye – and he sensed she was calculating what was her best option. In the end the door shut, and when it opened again it opened all the way. “All right,” she said.

Chadwick followed her into an L-shaped room, the smaller part of which was taken up with a tiny kitchen. The rest was sparsely furnished, perhaps because there was so little space. There was no carpet on the floor, only old wood. A mattress covered in red cheesecloth and scattered with cushions sat against one wall, and in front of that stood a low glass table holding a vase of flowers, a copy of the Evening Standard, an ashtray and a book called The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Chadwick had never heard of Hermann Hesse, but he had the feeling he would be safer sticking to Dick Francis, Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley. An acoustic guitar leaned against one wall.

Tania stretched out on the mattress, leaning against the wall, and Chadwick grabbed one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs. The room seemed clean and bright, with a colorful abstract painting on the wall and a little light coming in through the sash window, but there was no disguising the essential decrepitude of the house and neighborhood.

The woman was as Dennis Nokes and Robin Merchant had described her, petite, attractive, with white teeth and glossy dark hair down to her waist. She was wearing flared jeans and a thin cotton blouse that left little to the imagination. She reached for a packet of Pall Mall filter-tipped and lit one. “I just found out yesterday,” she said, blowing out smoke. “About Linda.”

“How?”

“The newspaper. I’ve been away.”

“How long?”

“Nine days.”

It made sense. Chadwick had only discovered Linda Lofthouse’s identity from Carol Wilkinson on Saturday, so it hadn’t really hit the papers and other news media until Monday, and now it was Wednesday, ten days since the Brimleigh Festival had ended and the body was discovered. Looking at Tania, he could see that she had been crying; the tears had dried and crusted on her flawless olive skin, and her big green eyes were glassy.

“Where were you?” Chadwick asked.

“In France, with my boyfriend. He’s studying in Paris. The Sorbonne. I just got back yesterday.”

“I assume we could check that?”

“Go ahead.” She gave him a name and a telephone number in Paris. It wasn’t much use to Chadwick. The guy was her boyfriend, after all, and he would probably swear black was white for her. But he had to go through the motions.

“You were at Brimleigh, though?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what I want to talk about.”

Tania blew out some smoke and reached for the ashtray on the table, cradling it on her lap between her crossed legs.

“What happened there?” Chadwick went on.

“What do you mean, ‘What happened there?’ Lots of things happened there. It was a festival, a celebration.”

“Of what?”

“Youth. Music. Life. Love. Peace. Things you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Chadwick. “I was young once.” He was getting used to being criticized by these people for being old and square, and as it didn’t bother him in the least, it seemed easier just to brush it aside with a glib comment, like water off a duck’s back. What he still didn’t understand, though, despite Enderby’s explanation, was why intelligent young people from good homes wanted to come to places like this and live in squalor, probably hardly eating a healthy meal from one day to the next. Were all the sex and drugs you wanted worth such a miserable existence?

Tania managed a little smile. “It was different then.”

“You can say that again. Swing. Jitterbug. Glenn Miller. Tommy Dorsey. Henry Hall. Harry Roy. Nat Gonella. Al Bowlly. Real music. And the war, of course.”

“We choose not to fight in wars.”

“It must be nice to believe that you have a choice,” said Chadwick, feeling the anger rise the way it did when he heard such pat comments. He was keen to steer back to the topic at hand. They’d sidetrack you, these people, put you on the defensive, and before you knew it you’d be arguing about war and revolution. “Look, I’d just like to know the story of you and Linda: how you came to be at Brimleigh, why you didn’t leave together, what happened. Is that so difficult?”

“Not at all. We drove up on Sunday morning. I’ve got an old Mini.”

“Just the two of you?”

“That’s about all you can fit in a Mini if you want to be comfortable.”

“And you were only there for the one day?”

“Yes. The Mad Hatters said they could get backstage passes for us, but only for the day they were there. That was Sunday. To be honest, we didn’t really feel like sitting around in a muddy field in Yorkshire for three days.”

That was about the first sensible thing Chadwick had heard a young person say in a long time. “When did you arrive?”

“Early afternoon.”

“Were the Mad Hatters there already?”

“They were around.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, it was great, really. We got to park where the bands parked, and we could just come and go as we pleased.”

“What was going on back there?”

“Music, mostly, believe it or not. When the bands were playing you could get around the front, in the press enclosure, if there was room. That was where you got the best view in the entire place.”

“The rest of the time?”

“It’s sort of like a garden party round the back. You know, a beer tent, food, tables and chairs, someone plucking on a guitar, conversation, jamming, dancing. Like a big club and a restaurant rolled into one. It got a bit chaotic at times, especially between bands when the roadies were running back and forth, but mostly it was great fun.”

“I understand there were caravans for some of the stars.”

“People need privacy. And, you know, if you wanted somewhere to go and… Well, I don’t have to spell it out, do I?”

“Did you go to a caravan with anyone?”

Her eyes widened and her skin flushed. “That’s hardly a question a gentleman would ask of a lady. And I can’t see as it has any bearing on what happened to Linda.”

“So nobody needed to go into the woods for privacy?”

“No. It was like we had our own little community, and there was no one there to lay down the law, to tell us what to do. A perfect anarchist state.”

Chadwick thought that was something of a contradiction in terms, but he didn’t bother pointing it out. He didn’t want to get sidetracked again. “Who did you spend your time with?” he asked.

“Lots of people. I suppose I was with Chris Adams a fair bit. He’s the Hatters’ manager. A nice guy. Smart and sensitive.” She smiled. “And not too stoned to have a decent conversation with.”

Interesting, Chadwick thought, that Adams hadn’t mentioned this. But why would he? It would only connect him with events from which he wanted to distance himself and his group. “Were you with him during Led Zeppelin’s performance?”

Tania frowned. “No. I was out front, in the press enclosure. I suppose he might have been there, but it was really crowded and dark. I don’t remember seeing him.”

“You’re American, I understand,” Chadwick said.

“Canadian, actually. But a lot of people make that mistake. And don’t worry, I’m here legally, work permit and all. My parents were born here. Scotland. Strathclyde. My father was a professor at the university there.”

A professor’s daughter, no less. And no doubt they had moved to Canada because he was better paid over there. Even less reason, then, for Tania to be spending her days in a tiny, shabby bedsit in Notting Hill. “So what about Linda?” he asked. “Did she disappear into any caravans?”

“Not that I saw. Look, Linda got a bit claustrophobic, developed a headache, and when Led Zeppelin came on, she told me she was going for a walk in the woods. I told her I’d probably be heading back home as soon as they finished because I wanted to catch a bit of sleep before taking the ferry over to see my boyfriend, Jeff. She told me not to worry about her, she had friends she could stay with. I knew that. I’d been up with her before and met them. It was a place in Leeds, where she used to live before she moved to London.”

“Bayswater Terrace?”

“That sounds right.”

“So she told you she would stay there?”

“Not in so many words. Only that she wasn’t planning on heading back to London with me that night.”

“Any reason?”

“I guess there were just people she wanted to see. I mean, it was where she came from. Home, I guess.”

“Did you see any of these people from the house with her at the festival?”

“No. Like I said, we had backstage passes. We were in with the bands. We didn’t know anybody there apart from Vic, Robin, Chris and the rest. Didn’t even know them very well. Look, as you can imagine, it got a bit wild at times, like all parties do. Linda slipped away. I didn’t see her again.”

“Did she have a flower painted on her face when she left you?”

Tania looked puzzled. “Flower? I don’t think so. I don’t know. It was dark. I don’t remember.”

“Would you have noticed?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Lots of girls had flowers painted on their faces. Is it important?”

“It could be.” Chadwick remembered Robin Merchant saying that Linda did have the flower on her face when he last saw her. “How was she going to get to Leeds? It was the middle of the night.”

“Hitch a ride. There were plenty of people heading that way. Most of the crowd came from Leeds or Bradford. Stands to reason.”

“Was this your original plan? For her to stay in Leeds, hitch a ride?”

“Plan? We didn’t have a plan. It was all pretty spontaneous. I mean, she knew I was going to Paris on Monday and I had to drive back Sunday night, but she also knew she could come back down to London with me in the Mini if she wanted.”

“And what did you do?”

“After Zeppelin finished, I went round the back again, hung around awhile and waited for her. There was still a party going on backstage, but people were leaving fast. I didn’t see her, so I assumed she’d headed off to Bayswater Terrace. I got in my car and drove back down here. It was about four in the morning by the time I left and I got home about nine. I slept till two, then drove to Dover and took the ferry to Calais.”

“You must have been tired.”

“Not really.”

“Don’t you have a job?”

“I’m between jobs. I’m a temp. I happened to be good at typing at school. I can choose my own hours now.”

“But what about education? You said your father was a professor. Surely he would want you to go to university?”

She gave him a curious, almost pitying look. “What my father wants doesn’t come into it,” she said. “It’s my life. I might go to university one day, but it’ll be when I want to, not when someone else decides for me.” Tania shook her hair back and lit another cigarette.

Chadwick thought he saw a mouse scurry across the kitchen floor. He gave a little shudder. It wasn’t that mice scared him, but the idea of living with them held no appeal. “I’d like to know more about Linda,” he said. “I understand she was a shopgirl?”

Tania laughed. “‘Shopgirl.’ How very quaint and English. I suppose you could say that. She worked at Biba, but she wanted to be a designer. She was good, too.”

“Wouldn’t they be worried about her not coming back?”

“She took the week off.”

“So there was a plan?”

“There were possibilities, that’s all. There were some people in St. Ives she wanted to see. Maybe she was going to stay in Leeds a few days, see her friends and her mother and then go down there. I don’t know. She also had a friend living on Anglesey she wanted to visit. What can I say? Linda was a spontaneous sort of person. She just did things. That’s why I wasn’t worried about her. Besides, you don’t think… I mean, we were with people who are into love and peace and all that, and you just don’t expect…” Tears ran down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all too much.”

Chadwick gave her a few minutes to compose herself and wipe away the tears, then he said, “When Linda left the enclosure for the woods, did you see anyone follow her?”

Tania thought for a moment, sucked at her cigarette and flicked some ash. “No,” she said.

“Did you see anyone else go out around that time?”

“Not that I remember. Most of us were excited about Led Zeppelin, getting ready to go round the front and get our minds blown.”

“Could she have arranged to meet someone? Could the headache have been an excuse?”

Tania gave him a blank look. “Why would she? If she’d been going to meet someone, she’d have said so. It wasn’t Linda’s way to be sly and sneaky.”

Christ, Chadwick thought, it was a lot easier when you were dealing with ordinary folk, most of whom lied and cheated as easily as they breathed, rather than this lot with their fancy ideals and high-handed attitudes. “Did you notice anyone paying her undue attention?” he asked.

“Linda’s a beautiful girl. Of course there were people talking to her, maybe trying to make an impression, pick her up.”

“But nobody succeeded?”

Tania paused. “Linda wasn’t seeing anyone this past while,” she answered. “Look, I’ve seen what the newspapers say about us. The News of the World, the People, trash like that. They paint us as being some sort of drug-addled and sex-crazed subculture, nothing but orgies and excess. Well, some people might be like that, but Linda was a very spiritual person. She was into Buddhism, the cabala, yoga, astrology, tarot, all sorts of spiritual stuff, and sometimes she just… you know… sex wasn’t always a part of it for her.”

“And drugs?”

“Out of the picture, too. I’m not saying she’d never smoked a joint or dropped a tab of acid, but not for a while. She was moving on, evolving.”

“I understand the two of you performed musical duets together?”

Tania looked at him as if she didn’t understand, then she managed a brief smile. “Performed musical duets? We sang together sometimes, if that’s what you mean, just in folk clubs and such.”

“Can I have a look at Linda’s flat?”

Tania bit her lip. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t. I mean…”

“You can come with me, keep an eye on me. It’ll have to be done eventually. Officially.”

Finally, Tania said, “Okay. I’ve got a key. Come on.”

She led him across the hall. Linda’s room was the same shape as Tania’s, but like a mirror image. It was more luxuriously furnished, with a couple of patterned rugs on the floor and a stylized painting of a man sitting cross-legged under a tree, surrounded by strange symbols, on the wall. Chadwick recognized the signs of the zodiac from the newspaper horoscopes Janet read. There was also a small bookcase full of volumes on mysticism and the spiritual life and packs of variously scented joss sticks. An acoustic guitar, similar to the one in Tania’s room, leaned against the wall.

Linda also had a small record player, and beside it stood a stack of LPs similar to those Yvonne had. There was nothing really personal in the room, at least not that Chadwick could find. One drawer held a couple of letters from her mother and some old photographs taken with her father. There were no diaries or notebooks – whatever she had been carrying with her at Brimleigh had disappeared – and very little else apart from her birth certificate and post office book showing that she had £123 13s 5d in her account, which seemed rather a lot to Chadwick. She had also set up a sewing machine at a makeshift table, and there were a few bolts of printed fabric lying around. In her small wardrobe hung many long dresses and skirts of bright print fabrics and other materials.

He searched under the drawers and tried the cupboards and wardrobe for false bottoms but found nowhere that might have provided a good hiding place for drugs. If Tania knew this was what he was doing, she didn’t say anything. She just leaned against the doorjamb with her arms folded.

As far as food was concerned, the pickings were slim. Linda had no oven, only a gas burner beside the little sink, and the contents of her cupboard consisted of brown rice, chickpeas, muesli, tahini, mung beans and various herbs and spices. There was no refrigerator, either, and no sign of meat, vegetables or dairy products, except for a bottle of sterilized milk on the table. Frugal living indeed.

Frustrated, Chadwick stood by the door and gave one last look around. Still nothing.

“What will happen to it now?” Tania asked.

“I suppose it’ll be relet eventually,” he said. “For the moment I’ll get the local police to come in and seal it off until we’ve done a thorough search. What do you know about Rick Hayes?”

Tania locked Linda’s door and led Chadwick back to her room, where they resumed their previous positions.

“Rick Hayes, the promoter?”

“That’s the one.”

“Nothing much. I chatted with him a couple of times. He’s a bit of a creep. If you must know, he tried to pick me up, suggested we go to his caravan.”

“And?”

“I told him to get lost.”

“How did he react?”

“He laughed and said he liked a girl who spoke her mind. Look, Hayes is one of those men who asks every girl he meets to sleep with him. He thinks the odds are pretty good. If nine out of ten tell him what they think of him, or slap his face, there’s always the tenth who might say yes.”

“He knew Linda, is that right?”

“They’d met before, yes. Once we went backstage at a Mad Hatters concert at the Roundhouse and Rick was there. He’s harmless enough, really. To be honest, he’s far too taken with himself to really give much thought to anyone else.”

“But if someone he wanted turned him down, do you think he could get violent?”

Tania gave him a sharp look. “I… I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it. He’s got a bit of a temper. I saw him laying into one of the security guards, but that was just… I don’t know, some sort of a power trip, I thought. You’re not suggesting he might have killed Linda because she wouldn’t let him fuck her?”

If the word was meant to shock Chadwick, it did. He wasn’t used to such language coming from the mouths of such lovely young women. He was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of a reaction, though. “Did you see him leave the enclosure during the time you were there?”

“No. Mostly he was coordinating with the performers and roadies, making sure the equipment got set up right and everything went smoothly. There were a few problems with the PA system and so on that he also had to deal with. And he acted as MC, introducing the bands. He was really pretty busy all the time. I don’t think he’d have had a chance to slip away even if he’d wanted to.”

“So he was always in sight?”

“Pretty much. Not always, but most of the time you’d see him out the corner of your eye here and there, running around. There was always somebody wanting him for something.”

“Where was he while Linda was in the woods?”

“I don’t know. Like I told you, I went round to the front to get a good view.”

“Was he there?”

“No. He introduced the band, then he left the stage.”

“Did you see him after that?”

“Come to think of it, no. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he could have had anything to do with what happened.”

“Probably not,” said Chadwick, standing to leave. “It just pays to cover all the angles, that’s all.” He lingered at the door. “Before I leave, tell me how Linda was behaving these past few weeks.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

“No.”

“Was she upset, depressed or worried about anything?”

“No, she was her usual self. She was saving up to go to India. She was really excited about that.”

Chadwick, who had spent time in India before seeing action in Burma during the war, didn’t understand what there was to get excited about. As far as he was concerned, the place was filthy, hot and unsanitary. Still, it explained the reason for the £123 13s 5d in her post office account. “Is that all?”

“As far as I know.”

“Had she fought or argued with anyone recently?”

“Not that I know. I doubt it, anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“Linda didn’t like scenes or arguments. She was a peaceful person, easygoing.”

“Did anyone threaten her in any way?”

“Good Lord, no.”

“Was anybody bothering her?”

“No. The only thing that was at all upsetting her was Vic Greaves. They weren’t close or anything, but they were family, and on the two or three occasions we saw the Mad Hatters, he seemed to be getting worse. She thought he ought to be getting treatment, but whenever she mentioned it to Chris, he just said shrinks were government brainwashers and mental hospitals were prisons for the true visionaries. I suppose he had a point.”

“Did either you or Linda try to do anything about Greaves?”

“What do you mean?”

“Persuade him to get treatment.”

“Linda did once, but he refused point-blank.”

“Did you try to change Chris Adams’s mind?”

“It wasn’t his decision,” Tania said. “Look, nobody was going to be party to getting Vic Greaves certified. Simple as that.”

“I see,” said Chadwick. The decision didn’t surprise him after the time he had spent with the Mad Hatters. He would be talking to them again soon anyway. He opened the door and went into the hall. “Many thanks, Miss Hutchison.”

“No problem.”

“I must say you seem to be one of the most sensible people I’ve talked to since all this began.”

Tania gave him an enigmatic smile. “Don’t count on it,” she said. “Appearances can be deceptive.”

Thursday, 18th September, 1969

Perhaps it was the spices he had smelled in Portobello Road that sparked it – they say smell is closest to memory – or maybe it was even going to see The Battle of Britain after his visit to Tania Hutchison that brought it all back, but Chadwick awoke in his hotel bed at 3:00 a.m. in a cold sweat. He couldn’t say that it was a dream, because it had actually happened, but he had buried it so deeply in his subconscious that when it rose up, as it did from time to time, it did so in a jumble of images so vivid they were almost surreal.

Buried under two bodies, mouth and nose full of sand on Gold Beach, the air all smoke and fire, bullets cracking and thudding into the sand nearby, blood seeping through his uniform, the man on top of him whimpering as he died, crying for his mother. Charging the bunkers with Taffy in Burma. Taffy wounded, his guts poking out, stumbling forward into the gunfire, diving into the bunker of Japanese soldiers, knowing he was going to die and pulling the pin on his hand grenade. Bits of people raining down on Chadwick: an eyeball, pieces of brain, blood and tissue.

And so it went on, a series of fragmented nightmare images from the Burmese jungle and the Normandy beaches. He not only saw and heard but smelled it all again in his dream – the gunfire, smoke, heat – tasted the sand in his mouth.

He feared that there would be no more sleep tonight, so he sat up, took the glass of water he had left on his bedside table and drank it down, then went to refill it. Still hours to go until dawn. And these were the worst hours, the hours when his fears got the better of him. The only solution was to get up and do something to take his mind off it all. He wasn’t going to go walking around King’s Cross at this hour in the morning, so he turned on the bedside light, took Alistair MacLean’s Force Ten from Navarone out of his overnight bag and settled back on the pillows to read. By the time the pale glow of sunrise started spreading over the city from the east, his book had fallen on his chest and he was snoring quietly in a dreamless sleep.