Piece Of My Heart

CHAPTER ONE

Monday, 8th September, 1969

To an observer looking down from the peak of Brimleigh Beacon early that Monday morning, the scene below might have resembled the aftermath of a battle. It had rained briefly during the night, and the pale sun coaxed tendrils of mist from the damp earth. They swirled over fields dotted with motionless shapes, mingling here and there with the darker smoke of smoldering embers. Human scavengers picked their way through the carnage as if collecting discarded weapons, occasionally bending to extract an object of value from a dead man’s pocket. Others appeared to be shoveling soil or quicklime into large open graves. The light wind carried a whiff of rotting flesh.

And over the whole scene a terrible stillness reigned.

But to Dave Sampson, down on the field, there had been no battle, only a peaceful gathering, and Dave had the worm’s-eye view. It was just after 8:00 a.m., and he had been up half the night along with everyone else listening to Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. Now, the crowd had gone home, and he was moving among the motionless shapes, litter left behind by the vanished hordes, helping to clean up after the very first Brimleigh Festival. Here he was, bent over, back aching like hell, eyes burning with tiredness, plodding across the muddy field picking up rubbish. The eerie sounds of Jimmy Page playing his electric guitar with a violin bow still echoed in his mind as he shoved cellophane wrappers and half-eaten Mars bars into his plastic bag.

Ants and beetles crawled over the remains of sandwiches and half-empty tins of cold baked beans. Flies buzzed around the feces and wasps hovered about the necks of empty pop bottles. More than once, Dave had to maneuver sharply to avoid being stung. He couldn’t believe some of the stuff people left behind. Food wrappers, soggy newspapers and magazines, used Durex, tampons, cigarette ends, knickers, empty beer cans and roaches you’d expect, but what on earth had the person who left the Underwood typewriter been thinking of? Or the wooden crutch? Had a cripple, suddenly healed by the music, run off and left it behind?

There were other things, too, things best avoided. The makeshift toilets set over the open cesspit had been uninviting, as well as few and far between, and the queues had been long, encouraging more than one desperate person to find a quiet spot elsewhere in the field. Dave glanced toward the craters and felt glad that he wasn’t one of the volunteers assigned to fill them up with earth.

In an otherwise isolated spot at the southern edge of the field, where the land rose gently toward the fringes of Brimleigh Woods, Dave noticed an abandoned sleeping bag. The closer he got, the more it looked to be occupied. Had someone passed out or simply gone to sleep? More likely, Dave thought, it was drugs. All night the medical tent had been open to people suffering hallucinations from bad acid, and there had been enough Mandrax and opiated hash around to knock out an army.

Dave prodded the bag with his foot. It felt soft and heavy. He prodded it again, harder this time. Still nothing. It definitely felt as if there was someone inside. Finally, he bent and pulled the zip, and when he saw what was there, he wished he hadn’t.

Monday, 8th September, 1969

Detective Inspector Stanley Chadwick was at his desk in Brotherton House before eight o’clock Monday morning, as usual, with every intention of finishing off the paperwork that had piled up during his two weeks’ annual leave at the end of August. The caravan at Primrose Valley, with Janet and Yvonne, had made a nice haven for a while, but Yvonne was obviously restless as only a sixteen-year-old on holiday with her parents can be, and crime didn’t stop while he was away from Leeds. Nor, apparently, did the paperwork.

It had been a good weekend. Yorkshire beat Derbyshire in the Gillette Cup Final, and if Leeds United, coming off a season as league champions, hadn’t managed to beat Manchester United at home, at least they had come out of it with a 2-2 draw, and Billy Bremner had scored.

The only blot on the landscape was that Yvonne had stayed out most of the night on Sunday, and it wasn’t the first time. Chadwick had lain awake until he heard her come in at about half past six, and by then it was time for him to get up and get ready for work. Yvonne had gone straight to her room and closed her door, so he had put off the inevitable confrontation until later, and now it was gnawing at him. He didn’t know what was happening to his daughter, what she was up to, but whatever it was, it frightened him. It seemed that the younger generation had been getting stranger and stranger over the past few years, more out of control, and Chadwick felt unable to find any point of connection with them anymore. Most of them were like members of another species to him now. Especially his own daughter.

Chadwick tried to shake off his worries about Yvonne and glanced over the crime sheets: trouble with squatters in a Leeds city center office building; a big drugs bust in Chapeltown; an assault on a woman with a stone in a sock in Bradford. Manningham Lane, he noticed, and everyone knew what kind of women you found on Manningham Lane. Still, poor cow, nobody deserved to be hit with a stone in a sock. Just over the county border, in the North Riding, the Brimleigh Festival had gone off peacefully enough, with only a few arrests for drunkenness and drug dealing – only to be expected at such an event – and a bit of bother with some skinheads at one of the fences.

At about half past nine, Chadwick reached for the next file, and he had just opened it when Karen popped her head around his door and told him Detective Chief Superintendent McCullen wanted to see him. Chadwick put the folder back on the pile. If McCullen wanted to see him, it had to be something pretty big. Whatever it was, it was bound to be a lot more interesting than paperwork.

McCullen sat in his spacious office puffing on his pipe and enjoying the panoramic view. Brotherton House perched at the western edge of the city center, adjacent to the university and Leeds General Infirmary buildings, and it looked out west over the new Inner Ringroad toward Park Lane College. All the old mills and factories in the area, blackened by a century or more of soot, had been demolished over the last two or three years, and it seemed that a whole new city was rising from the ruins of its Victorian past: the International Swimming Pool, Leeds Playhouse, Leeds Polytechnic, the Yorkshire Post Building. Cranes crisscrossed on the horizon and the sound of pneumatic drills filled the air. Was it just Chadwick’s imagination, or was there a building site no matter where you looked in the city these days?

He wasn’t sure that the future was better than the past it was replacing any more than he was sure the emerging world order was better than the old one. There seemed a monotonous sterility to many of the new buildings, concrete-and-glass tower blocks for the most part, along with terraces of redbrick council houses. Their Victorian predecessors, like Benjamin Gott’s Bean Ing Mills, might have looked a bit more grimy and shabby, but at least they had character. Or perhaps, Chadwick thought, he was just becoming an old fogy about architecture, the same way he was about young people. And at forty-eight, he was too young for that. He made a mental note to try to be more tolerant of hippies and architects.

“Stan, sit down,” said McCullen, gesturing to the seat opposite his desk. He was a hard, compact man, one of the old school, and fast nearing retirement. Gray hair in a severe crew cut, sharp, square features, an intimidating gleam in his narrowed eyes. People said he had no sense of humor, but Chadwick thought it was just so dark and buried so deep that nobody could recognize it, or wanted to find it. McCullen had served as a commando during the war, and Chadwick had seen more than enough active duty himself. He liked to think it created a bond between them, something in common that they never spoke about. They also shared a Scottish background. Chadwick’s mother was a Scot, and his father had worked in the Clydebank shipyards. Chadwick had grown up in Glasgow, drifting down to Yorkshire only after the war.

Chadwick sat.

“I won’t beat about the bush,” McCullen began, knocking his pipe on the heavy glass ashtray, “but there’s been a body discovered at Brimleigh Glen, the big field where they held the festival this weekend. I don’t have many details yet. The report has just this minute come in. All we know is that the victim is a young woman.”

“Oh,” said Chadwick, aware of that cold sinking feeling deep in his belly. “I thought Brimleigh was the North Riding?”

McCullen refilled his pipe. “Strictly speaking, it is,” he said finally, releasing clouds of aromatic blue smoke. “Just over the border. But they’re country coppers. They don’t get many murders, just a bit of sheep-shagging now and then. They’ve certainly got no one capable of handling an investigation of this magnitude, given how many people must have been attending that festival, and they’re asking for our help. I thought, perhaps, with your recent successes…”

“The locals still won’t like it,” Chadwick said. “Perhaps it’s not as bad as having Scotland Yard tramping all over your provincial toes, but-”

“It’s already cleared,” said McCullen, turning his gaze back to the window. “There’s a local detective sergeant, name of Keith Enderby. You’ll be working with him. He’s already at the scene.” McCullen glanced at his wristwatch. “Better get out there, Stan. DC Bradley’s waiting with the car. The doc’ll be there soon wanting to get the body back to the mortuary for the postmortem.”

Chadwick knew when he was being dismissed. Solve two murders so far this year and you get lumbered with a case like this. Bloody hippies. Paperwork suddenly didn’t look so bad, after all. Tolerance, he told himself. He stood up and headed for the door.

Monday, 8th September, 1969

There was no easy access to the body in the field, not without getting his shoes muddy. Chadwick cursed under his breath as he saw his lovingly polished black brogues and the bottoms of his suit trousers daubed with brown mud. If he’d been a rural copper, he’d have kept a pair of wellies in the boot of his car, but you don’t expect mud when you’re used to working the streets of Leeds. If anything, DC Bradley complained even more.

Brimleigh Glen looked like a vast tip. A natural amphitheater cupped between low hills to the east and north and Brimleigh Woods to the west and south, it was a popular spot for picnics and brass band concerts in summer. Not this weekend, though. A stage had been erected at the western end of the field, abutting the woods, and the audience had sprawled as far back as the hillsides on the eastern and northern sides, to a distance where, Chadwick guessed, nobody would have been able to see very much at all except little dots.

The small knot of people surrounding the body stood at the southern edge of the field, about a hundred yards back from the stage, near the edge of the woods. When Chadwick and Bradley arrived, a man with long greasy hair, bell-bottom jeans and an Afghan waistcoat turned and said with far more aggression than Chadwick would have expected of someone who was supposed to embrace peace and love, “Who the fuck are you?”

Chadwick feigned a surprised expression and looked around, then he pointed his thumb at his own chest. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you.”

A clearly embarrassed young man hurried over to them. “Er… I think that’s probably the detective inspector from Leeds. Am I right, sir?”

Chadwick nodded.

“How d’you do, sir? I’m Detective Sergeant Enderby, North Yorkshire Constabulary. This is Rick Hayes, the festival promoter.”

“You must have been up all night,” said Chadwick. “I’d have thought you’d be long tucked up in bed by now.”

“There’s still a lot to see to,” Hayes said, gesturing behind him. “That scaffolding, for a start. It’s rented and it all has to be accounted for. I’m sorry, by the way.” He glanced in the direction of the sleeping bag. “This has all been very upsetting.”

“I’m sure,” said Chadwick, making his way forward. There were four people besides himself and DC Bradley at the scene, only one of them a uniformed policeman, and most of them were standing far too close to the body. They were also very casually dressed. Even DS Enderby’s hair, Chadwick noticed, was dangerously close to touching the collar of his jacket, and his sideboards needed trimming. His black winkle-pickers looked as if they had been dirty even before he crossed the field. “Were you the first officer to arrive at the scene?” Chadwick asked the young police constable, trying to move people back and clear a little space around the sleeping bag.

“Yes, sir. PC Jacobs. I was on patrol when the call came in.”

“Who called it in?”

One of the others stepped forward. “I did. Steve Naylor. I was working on the scaffolding when Dave here shouted me over. There’s a phone box on the road on the other side of the hill.”

“Did you find the body?” Chadwick asked Dave Sampson.

“Yes.”

Sampson looked pale, as well he might, Chadwick thought. His own war service and eighteen years on the force had hardened him to the sight of violent death, but he hadn’t forgotten his first time, and he never forgot how devastating it could appear to someone who had never witnessed it before. He looked around. “Any chance someone might rustle up a pot of tea?”

Everyone stared at him, dumbfounded, then Naylor, the stage worker, said, “We’ve got a Primus and a billycan back there. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good lad.”

Naylor headed for the stage.

Chadwick turned back to Sampson. “Touch anything?” he asked.

“Only the zip. I mean, I didn’t know… I thought…”

“What did you think?”

“It felt like there was someone inside. I thought they might be asleep or…”

“On drugs?”

“Possibly. Yes.”

“After you opened the zip and saw what it was, what did you do then?”

“I called over to the stage.”

Chadwick looked at the speckled mess on the grass about a yard away. “Before or after you were sick?”

Sampson swallowed. “After.”

“Did you touch the body at all?”

“No.”

“Good. Now go over and give your statement to Detective Sergeant Enderby. We’ll probably want to talk to you again, so stick around.”

Sampson nodded.

Chadwick crouched by the blue sleeping bag, keeping his hands in his pockets so that he didn’t touch anything, even by accident. Only the upper half of the girl’s body was exposed, but it was enough. She was wearing a smocked white dress with a scooped neck, and the area under the left breast was a mess – knife work, by the looks of it. Also, her dress was bunched up around her waist, as if she hadn’t had time to smooth it down when she got into the bag – or as if someone had shoved her in quickly after he’d killed her. The long dress could also have been raised for sexual purposes, if she had been sharing the sleeping bag with her boyfriend, Chadwick realized, but he would have to wait for the pathologist to find out any more about that.

She was a very pretty girl, with long blond hair, an oval face and full lips. She looked so innocent. Not unlike Yvonne, he thought, with a sudden shudder, and Yvonne had been out all last night, too. But she had come home. Not this girl. She was perhaps a year or two older than Yvonne, and her eye shadow emphasized the color of her big blue eyes. The mascara stood out in stark contrast to the paleness of her skin. She wore several strings of cheap colored beads around her neck, and she had a cornflower painted on her right cheek.

There was nothing more Chadwick could do until the Home Office pathologist arrived, which should be very soon, McCullen had given him to understand. Standing, he scanned the ground nearby but saw only rubbish: KitKat wrappers, a soggy International Times, an empty pouch of Old Holborn rolling tobacco, an orange pack of Rizla cigarette papers. It would all have to be bagged and checked out, of course. He sniffed the air – moist but warm enough for the time of year – and glanced at his watch. Half past eleven. It looked like being another fine day, and a long one.

He turned his gaze back to the others. “Anybody recognize her?”

They all shook their heads. Chadwick thought he noticed a little hesitation in Rick Hayes’s reaction.

“Mr. Hayes?”

“No,” said Hayes. “Never seen her before.”

Chadwick thought he was lying about not recognizing the girl, but it would keep. He noticed a movement by the stage and looked to see Naylor coming back with a tray and, following shortly behind him, a nattily dressed man who seemed to be about as happy to find himself walking across a muddy field as Chadwick had been. But this man was carrying a black bag. The pathologist had arrived at last.

October 2005

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks hit the play button, and after the heartbeats, the glorious sound of “Breathe” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon filled the room. He still hadn’t got the hang of the new equipment yet, but he was finding his way around it slowly. He had inherited a state-of-the-art sound system along with a DVD player, 42-inch plasma TV, 40G iPod and a Porsche 911 from his brother Roy. The estate had gone to Banks’s parents, but they were set in their ways and had no use for a Porsche or a large-screen TV. The first wouldn’t last five minutes parked outside their Peterborough council house, and the second wouldn’t fit in their living room. They had sold Roy’s London house, setting them both up nicely for the rest of their lives, and passed on the things they couldn’t use to Banks.

As for Roy’s iPod, Banks’s father had taken one look at it and been about to drop it in the waste bin before Banks rescued it. Now it had become as essential to him, when he went out, as his wallet and his mobile. He had been able to download the software and buy new chargers and cables, along with an adapter that allowed him to play it through his car radio, and while he had kept a great deal of his brother’s music library on it, he had managed to clear a good fifteen hours’ worth of space by deleting the complete Ring cycle, and that was far more than enough to accommodate his meager collection at the moment.

Banks headed into the kitchen to see how dinner was getting along. All he’d had to do was remove the packaging and put the foil tray in the oven, but he didn’t want to burn it. It was Friday evening, and Annie Cabbot was coming over for dinner tonight – just as a friend – and the evening was to be a sort of unofficial housewarming, though that was a term Banks hesitated to use these days. He had been back in the restored cottage for less than a month, and tonight would be Annie’s first visit.

It was a wild October night outside. Banks could hear the wind screaming and moaning and see the dark shadows of tree branches tossing and thrashing beyond the kitchen window. He hoped Annie would make the drive all right, that there were no trees down. There was a spare bed if she wanted to stay, but he doubted that she would. Too much history for that to be comfortable for either of them, although there had been moments over the summer when he had thought it wouldn’t take much to brush all the objections aside. Best not think about that, he told himself.

Banks poured himself the last of the Amarone. His parents had inherited Roy’s wine cellar, and they had passed this on to him, too. As far as Arthur Banks was concerned, white wine was for sissies and red wine tasted like vinegar. His mother preferred sweet sherry. Their loss was Banks’s gain, and while it lasted, he got to enjoy the high life of first-growth Bordeaux and Sauternes, white and red Burgundy from major growers, Chianti Classico, Barolo and Amarone. When it was gone, of course, he would be back to boxes of Simply Chilean and Big Aussie Red, but for the moment he was enjoying himself.

Whenever he opened a bottle, though, he missed Roy, which was strange because they had never been close, and Banks felt he had only got to know his brother after his death. He would just have to learn to live with it. It was the same with the other things – the TV, stereo, car, music – they all made him think of the brother he had never really known.

Part of the way through “Us and Them” he heard the doorbell ring. Annie, half past seven, right on time. He walked through and opened the front door, flinching at the gust of wind that almost blew her into his arms. She edged back, giggling, trying to hold down her hair as Banks pushed the door shut, but even in the short trip from her car to his front door it had become a tangled mess.

“Quite the night out there,” Banks said. “I hope you didn’t have any problems getting here.”

Annie smiled. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She handed Banks a bottle of wine – Tesco’s Chilean Merlot, he noticed – and took out a hairbrush. As she attacked her hair, she wandered around the front room. “This is certainly different from what I expected,” she said. “It looks really cozy. I see you did go for the dark wood, after all.”

The wood for the desk had been one of the things they had talked about, and Annie had advised the darker color, as opposed to light pine. What had been Banks’s main living room was now a small study complete with bookcases, a reproduction Georgian writing table for the laptop computer under the window, and a couple of comfortable brown leather armchairs arranged around the fire, perfect for reading. A door by the side of the fireplace led into the new entertainment room, which ran the length of the house. Annie walked up and down and admired it, though she did tell Banks she thought it was a bit of a bloke’s den.

The TV hung on the wall at the front and the speakers were spread about in strategic positions around the deep plum sofa and armchairs. Storage racks on the side walls held CDs and DVDs, mostly Roy’s, apart from the few Banks had bought over the past couple of months. At the back, French windows led to the new conservatory.

They wandered into the kitchen, which had been completely remodeled. Banks had tried to make sure it was as close to the original as possible, with the pine cupboards, copper-bottomed pans on wall hooks and the breakfast nook, where bench and table matched the cupboards, but that strange benign presence he had felt there before had gone for good, or so it seemed. Now it was a fine kitchen, but only a kitchen. The builders had run the conservatory along the entire back of the house, and there was also a door leading to it from the kitchen.

“Impressive,” Annie said. “All this and a Porsche parked outside, too. You’ll be pulling the birds like nobody’s business.”

“Some hope,” said Banks. “I might even sell the Porsche.”

“Why?”

“It just feels so strange, having all Roy’s stuff. I mean, the TV and the movies and CDs are okay, I suppose, not quite as personal, but the car… I don’t know. Roy loved that car.”

“Give it a chance. You might get to love it, too.”

“I like it well enough. It’s just… oh, never mind.”

“Mmm, it smells good in here. What’s for dinner?”

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

Annie gave him a look.

“Vegetarian lasagna,” he said. “Marks and Spencer’s best.”

“That’ll do fine.”

Banks threw a simple salad together with an oil-and-vinegar dressing while Annie sat on the bench and opened the wine. Pink Floyd finished, so he went and put some Mozart wind quintets on the stereo. He’d had speakers wired into the kitchen, and the sound was good. When everything was ready, they sat opposite one another and Banks served the food. Annie was looking good, he thought. Her flowing chestnut hair still fell about her shoulders in disarray, but that only heightened her attraction for him. As for the rest, she was dressed in her usual casual style – just a touch of makeup, lightweight linen jacket, a green T-shirt and close-fitting black jeans, bead necklace, and several thin silver bracelets which jingled when she moved her hand.

They had hardly got beyond the first mouthful when Banks’s telephone rang. He muttered an apology to Annie and went to answer it.

“Sir?”

It was DC Winsome Jackman. “Yes, Winsome,” Banks said. “This had better be important. I’ve been slaving over a hot oven all day.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“There’s been a murder, sir.”

“Are you certain?”

“I wouldn’t be disturbing you if I wasn’t, sir,” Winsome said. “I’m at the scene right now. Moorview Cottage in Fordham, just outside Lyndgarth. I’m standing about six feet away from him, and the back of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone bashed him with the poker. Kev’s here, too, and he agrees. Sorry, Detective Sergeant Templeton. The local bobby called it in.”

Banks knew Fordham. It was nothing but a hamlet, really, a cluster of cottages, a pub and a church. “Christ,” he said. “Okay, Winsome, I’ll get there as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can call in the SOCOs and Dr. Glendenning, if he’s available.”

“Right you are, sir. Should I ring DI Cabbot?”

“I’ll deal with that. Keep the scene clear. We’ll be there. Half an hour at the most.”

Banks hung up and went back into the kitchen. “Sorry to spoil your dinner, Annie, but we’ve got to go out. Suspicious death. Winsome’s certain it’s murder.”

“Your car or mine?”

“Yours, I think. The Porsche is a bit pretentious for a crime scene, don’t you think?”

Monday, 8th September, 1969

As the day progressed, the scene around Brimleigh Glen became busy with the arrival of various medical and scientific experts and the incident van, a temporary operational headquarters with telephone communications and, more important, tea-making facilities. The immediate crime scene was taped off and a constable posted at the entrance to log the names of those who came and went. All work on rubbish disposal, stage dismantling and cesspit filling was suspended until further notice, much to the chagrin of Rick Hayes, who complained that every minute more spent at the field was costing him money.

Chadwick hadn’t forgotten Hayes’s possible lie earlier about not recognizing the victim, and he looked forward to the pleasure of a more in-depth interview. In fact, Hayes was high on his list of priorities. For the moment, though, it was important to get the investigation organized, get the mechanics in place and the right men appointed to the right jobs.

Detective Sergeant Enderby seemed capable enough on first impression, despite the length of his hair, and Chadwick already knew that Simon Bradley, his driver, was a bright young copper with a good future ahead of him. He also demonstrated the same sort of military neatness and precision in his demeanor that Chadwick appreciated. As for the rest of the team, they would come mostly from the North Riding, people he didn’t know, and he would have to learn their strengths and weaknesses on the hoof. He preferred to enter into an investigation on more certain ground, but it couldn’t be helped. Officially, this was North Yorkshire’s case, and he was simply helping out.

The doctor had pronounced the victim dead and turned the body over to the coroner’s officer, in this case a local constable specially appointed to the task, who arranged for its transportation to the mortuary in Leeds. During his brief examination at the scene, Dr. O’Neill had been able to tell Chadwick only that the wounds almost certainly had been caused by a thin bladed knife and that she had been dead less than ten hours and more than six before the time of his examination, which meant she had been killed sometime between half past one and half past five in the morning. Her body had been moved after death, he added, and she had not been in the sleeping bag when she died. Though stab wounds, even to the heart, often don’t bleed a great deal, the doctor said, he would have expected more blood on the inside of the sleeping bag had she been stabbed there.

How long she had lain elsewhere before she had been moved, or where she had lain, he couldn’t say, only that the postmortem lividity indicated that she had been on her back for some hours. From an external examination, it didn’t look as if she had been raped – she was still, in fact, wearing her white cotton knickers, and they looked clean – but only a complete postmortem would reveal details of any sexual activity prior to death. There were no defensive wounds on her hands, which most likely meant that she had been taken by surprise, and that the first stab had pierced her heart and incapacitated her immediately. There was light bruising on the front left side of her neck, which Dr. O’Neill said could be an indication that someone, the killer probably, had restrained her from behind.

So, Chadwick thought, the killer had made a clumsy attempt to make it look as if the girl had been killed in the bag on the field, and clumsy attempts to mislead often yield clues. Before doing anything else, Chadwick commissioned Enderby to get a team with a police dog together to comb Brimleigh Woods.

The photographer did his stuff and the specialists searched the scene, then bagged everything for scientific analysis. They got some partial footprints, but there was no guarantee that any of these were the killer’s. Even so, they patiently made plaster-of-Paris casts. There was no weapon in the immediate vicinity, hardly surprising as the victim hadn’t died there, nor was there anything in the sleeping bag or near her body to indicate who she was. Lack of drag marks indicated that she might have been moved there before it rained. The beads she wore were common enough, although Chadwick imagined it might be possible to track down a supplier.

Some poor mother and father would no doubt be wringing their hands with worry about now, as he had been wringing his about Yvonne. Had she been at the festival? he wondered. It would be just like her – the kind of music she listened to, her rebellious spirit, the clothes she wore. He remembered the fuss she had made when he and Janet wouldn’t let her go to the Isle of Wight Festival the weekend before. The Isle of Wight, for crying out loud. It was three hundred miles away. Anything could happen. What on earth had she been thinking about?

For the time being, the best course of action was to check all missing persons reports for someone matching the victim’s description. Failing any luck there, they would have to get a decent enough photograph of her to put in the papers and show on television, along with a plea for information from anyone in the crowd who might have seen or heard anything. However they did it, they needed to know who she was as soon as possible. Only then could they attempt to fathom out who had done this to her, and why.

The darkness deepened the closer Banks and Annie got to Lyndgarth. It looked as if the wind had taken down an electricity cable somewhere and caused a power cut. The silhouettes of branches jerked in the beam of the car’s headlights, while all around was darkness, not even the light of a distant farmhouse to guide them. In Lyndgarth, houses, pubs, church and village green were all in the dark. Annie drove slowly as the road curved out of town, over the narrow stone bridge and around the bend another half a mile or so to Fordham. Even in the surrounding darkness it was easy to see where all the fuss was as they came over the second bridge shortly after half past eight.

The main road veered sharp left at the pub, opposite the church, toward Eastvale, but straight ahead, on a rough track that continued up the hill past the youth hostel and over the wild moorland, a police patrol car blocked the way, along with Winsome’s unmarked Vectra. Annie pulled up behind the cars, and wind whipped at her clothes as she got out of the car. The trouble was in the last cottage on the left. Opposite Moorview Cottage, a narrow lane ran west between the side of the church and a row of cottages until it was swallowed up in the dark countryside.

“Not much of a place, is it?” said Banks.

“Depends on what you want,” said Annie. “It’s quiet enough, I suppose.”

“And there is a pub.” Looking back across the main road, Banks fancied he could see the glow of candlelight through the windows and hear the muffled tones of conversation from inside. A little thing like a power cut clearly wasn’t going to deprive the locals of their hand-pumped ale.

The light of a torch dazzled them, and Banks heard Winsome’s voice. “Sir? DI Cabbot? This way. I took the liberty of asking the SOCOs to bring some lighting with them, but for the moment this is all we’ve got.”

They followed the trail the torch lit up through a high wooden gate and a conservatory. The local PC was waiting inside the door, talking to newly promoted Detective Sergeant Kevin Templeton, and the light from his torch improved visibility quite a bit. Even so, they were limited to what they could see within the beams; the rest of the place was shrouded in darkness.

Treading carefully across the stone flags, Banks and Annie followed the lights to the edge of the living room. They weren’t wearing protective clothing, so they had to keep their distance until the experts had finished. There, sprawled on the floor near the fireplace, lay the body of a man. He was lying on his face, so Banks couldn’t tell how old he was, but his clothing – jeans and a dark green sweatshirt – suggested he was youngish. And Winsome was right; there was no doubt about this one. He could see even from a few feet away that the back of his head was a bloody mess and a long trail of dark coagulating blood gleamed in the torchlight, ending in a puddle that was soaking into the rug. Winsome moved her torch beam around and Banks could see a poker lying on the floor not far from the victim, and a pair of glasses with one lens broken.

“Do you notice any signs of a struggle?” Banks asked.

“No,” said Annie.

The beam picked out a packet of Dunhills and a cheap disposable lighter on the table beside the armchair, toward which the victim’s head was pointing. “Say he was going for his cigarettes,” Banks said.

“And someone took him by surprise?”

“Yes. But someone he had no reason to think would kill him.” Banks pointed to the rack by the fireplace. “The poker would most likely have been there on the hearth with the other implements.”

“Blood-spatter analysis should give us a better idea of how it happened,” Annie said.

Banks nodded and turned to Winsome. “First thing we do is seal off this room completely,” he said. “It’s out of bounds to anyone who doesn’t need to be in it.”

“Right, sir,” said Winsome.

“And organize a house-to-house as soon as possible. Ask for reinforcements, if necessary.”

“Sir.”

“Do we know who he is?”

“We don’t know anything yet,” Winsome said. “PC Travers here lives down the road and tells me he doesn’t know him. Apparently it’s a holiday cottage.”

“Then presumably there’s an owner somewhere.”

“She’s in here, sir.” It was the PC who spoke, and he pointed his torch into the dining room, where a woman sat in the dark on a hard-back chair staring into space. “I didn’t know what else to do with her, sir,” he went on. “I mean, I couldn’t let her go until she’d spoken with you, and she needed to sit down. She was feeling a bit faint.”

“You did the right thing,” said Banks.

“Anyway, it’s Mrs. Tanner. She’s the owner.”

“No, I’m not,” said Mrs. Tanner. “I just look after it for them. They live in London.”

“Okay,” said Banks, sitting down opposite her. “We’ll get those details later.”

PC Travers shone his torch along the table between them, so that neither was dazzled and each could at least see the other. From what Banks could tell, she was a stout woman in her early fifties with short graying hair and a double chin.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Tanner?” he asked.

She put a hand to her breast. “I’m better now, thank you. It was just a shock. In the dark and all… It’s not that I’ve never seen a dead body before. Just family, like, you know, but this…” She took a sip from the steaming mug in front of her. It looked as if Travers had had the good sense to make some tea, which meant there must be a gas cooker.

“Are you up to answering a few questions?” Banks asked her.

“I don’t know that I can tell you anything.”

“Leave that to me to decide. How did you come to find the body?”

“He was just lying there, like he is now. I didn’t touch anything.”

“Good. But what I meant was: Why did you come here?”

“It was the power cut. I live just down the road, see, the other side of the pub, and I wanted to show him where the emergency candles were. There’s a big torch, too.”

“What time was this?”

“Just before eight o’clock.”

“Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“No.”

“See anyone?”

“Not a soul.”

“No cars?”

“No.”

“Was the door open?”

“No. It was shut.”

“So what did you do?”

“First, I knocked.”

“And then?”

“Well, there was no answer, see, and it was all dark inside.”

“Didn’t you think he might be out?”

“His car’s still here. Who’d go out walking on a night like this?”

“What about the pub?”

“I looked in, but he wasn’t there, and nobody had seen him, so I came back here. I’ve got the keys. I thought maybe he’d had an accident or something, fallen down the stairs in the dark, and all because I’d forgotten to show him where the candles and the torch were.”

“Where are they?” Banks asked.

“In a box on the shelf under the stairs.” She shook her head slowly. “Sorry. As soon as I saw him just… lying there… it went out of my head completely, why I’d come.”

“That’s all right.”

Banks sent PC Travers to find the candles. He came back a few moments later. “There were matches in the kitchen by the cooker, sir,” he said, and proceeded to set candles in saucers and place them on the dining table.

“That’s better,” said Banks. He turned back to Mrs. Tanner. “Do you know who your guest was? His name?”

“Nick.”

“That’s all?”

“When he came by when he arrived last Saturday and introduced himself, he just said his name was Nick.”

“He didn’t give you a check with his full name on it?”

“He paid cash.”

“Is that normal?”

“Some people prefer it that way.”

“How long was he staying?”

“He paid for two weeks.”

Two weeks in the Yorkshire Dales in late October seemed like an odd holiday choice to Banks, but there was no accounting for taste. Maybe this Nick was a keen rambler. “How did he find the place?”

“The owners have a web site, but don’t ask me owt about that. I only see to the cleaning and general maintenance.”

“I understand,” said Banks. “Any idea where Nick came from?”

“No. He didn’t have any sort of foreign accent, but he wasn’t from around here. Down south, I’d say.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about him?”

“I only ever saw him the once,” Mrs. Tanner said. “He seemed like a nice enough lad.”

“How old would you say he was?”

“Not old. Mid-thirties, maybe. I’m not very good at ages.”

Car headlights shone through the window and soon the small house was filled with SOCOs. Peter Darby, the photographer, and Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, arrived at about the same time, Glendenning complaining that Banks thought he had nothing better to do than hang around dead bodies on a Friday evening. Banks asked PC Travers to take Mrs. Tanner home and stay with her. Her husband was out at a darts match in Eastvale, she said, but he would soon be back, and she assured Banks she would be fine on her own. The SOCOs quickly set up lights in the living room, and while Peter Darby photographed the cottage with his Pentax and digital camcorder, Banks watched Dr. Glendenning examine the body, turning it slightly to examine the eyes.

“Anything you can tell us, Doc?” Banks asked after a few minutes.

Dr. Glendenning got to his feet and sighed theatrically. “I’ve told you about that before, Banks. Don’t call me ‘Doc.’ It’s disrespectful.”

“Sorry,” said Banks. He peered at the corpse. “Anyway, he spoiled my Friday evening, too, so anything you can tell me would help.”

“Well, for a start, he’s dead. You can write that down in your little notebook.”

“I suspected as much,” said Banks.

“And don’t be so bloody sarcastic. You realize I was supposed to be at the Lord Mayor’s banquet by now drinking Country Manor and munching vol-au-vent?”

“Sounds bad for your health,” Banks said. “You’re better off here.”

Glendenning favored him with a sly smile. “Maybe you’re right at that, laddie.” He smoothed down his silvery hair. “Anyway, it was almost certainly the blow to the back of the head that killed him. I’ll know better when I get him on the table, of course, but that’ll have to do for now.”

“Time of death?”

“Not more than two or three hours. Rigor hasn’t started yet.”

Banks looked at his watch. Five past nine. Mrs. Tanner had probably been there about an hour or so, which narrowed it down even more, between six and eight, say. She couldn’t have missed the killer by long, which made her a very lucky woman. “Any chance he got drunk, fell and hit his head?” Banks knew it was unlikely, but he had to ask. You didn’t go off wasting valuable police time and resources on a domestic accident.

“Almost certainly not,” said Glendenning, glancing over at the poker. “For a start, if it had happened that way, he would most likely be lying on his back, and secondly, judging by the shape of the wound and the blood and hair on that poker over there, I’d say your murder weapon’s pretty obvious this time. Maybe you’ll find a nice clean set of fingerprints and be home by bedtime.”

“Some hope,” said Banks, seeing yet another weekend slip away. Why couldn’t murderers commit their crimes on Mondays? It wasn’t only the prospect of working all weekend that made Friday murders such a pain in the arse, but that people tended to make themselves scarce. Offices closed, workers visited relatives, everything slowed down. And the first forty-eight hours were crucial in any investigation. “Anyway,” he said, “the poker was close to hand, which probably means that whoever did it didn’t come prepared to kill. Or wanted to make it look that way.”

“I’ll leave the speculation to you. As far as I’m concerned, he belongs to the coroner now. You can remove the body whenever Cartier-Bresson here has finished.”

Banks smiled. He noticed Peter Darby stick his tongue out at Glendenning behind the doctor’s back. They always seemed to be getting in one another’s way at crime scenes, which were the only places they ever met.

By now it was impossible to ignore the activity in the rest of the house, which was swarming with SOCOs. Thick cables snaked through the conservatory, attached to bright lights which cast shadows of men in protective clothing on the walls. The place resembled a film set. Feeling very much in the way, Banks edged out toward the conservatory. The wind was still raging, and at times it felt strong enough to blow away the whole frail structure. It didn’t help that they had to leave the door open to let the cables in.

Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak, the crime scene coordinator, arrived next, and after a brief hello to Banks and Annie he set to work. It was his job to liaise between the scientists and the detectives, if necessary translating the jargon into comprehensible English, and he did it very well. His degrees in physics and chemistry certainly helped.

There are people who will stand for hours watching others work, Banks had noticed. You see them at building sites, eyes against the knotholes in the high wooden fences as the mechanical diggers claw at the earth and men in hard hats yell orders over the din. Or standing in the street looking up as someone on scaffolding sandblasts the front of an old building. Banks wasn’t one of them. That kind of thing was a perverse form of voyeurism as far as he was concerned. Besides, there was nothing much more he could do at the house now until the team had finished, and his thoughts moved pleasantly to the candlelit pub not more than thirty yards away. The people in there would have to be interviewed. Someone might have seen or heard something. One of them might even have done it. Best talk to them now, while they were still in there and their memories were fresh. He told Winsome and Templeton to stay with Stefan and the SOCOs and to come and get him if anything important came up, then he called out to Annie, and they headed for the gate.