Piece Of My Heart

CHAPTER THREE

It was after midnight when the lights came back on, and the wind was still raging, now lashing torrents of rain against the windows and lichen-stained roofs of Fordham. The coroner’s van had taken the body away, and Dr. Glendenning had said he would try to get the postmortem done the following day, even though it was a Saturday. The SOCOs worked on in the new light just as they had done before, collecting samples, labeling and storing everything carefully. So far, they had discovered nothing of immediate importance. One or two members of the local media had arrived, and the police press officer, David Whitney, was on the scene keeping them back and feeding them titbits of information.

Banks used the newly restored electric light to have a good look around the rest of the cottage, and it didn’t take him very long to realize that any personal items Nick might have had with him were gone except for his clothes, toiletries and a few books. There was no wallet, for example, no mobile, nothing with his name on it. The clothes didn’t tell him much. Nothing fancy, just casual Gap-style shirts, a gray-pinstripe jacket, cargos and Levi’s for the most part. All the toiletries told him was that Nick suffered from, or worried that he might suffer from, heartburn and indigestion, judging by the variety of antacids he had brought with him. Winsome reported that his car was a Renault Mégane, and to open it you needed a card, not a key. There wasn’t one in sight, so she had phoned the police garage in Eastvale, who said they would send someone out as soon as possible.

There was nothing relating to the car on the Police National Computer, Winsome added, so she would have to get the details from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea as soon as she could raise someone, which wouldn’t be easy on a weekend. If necessary, they could check the National DNA Database, which held samples of the DNA not only of convicted criminals but of anyone who had been arrested, even if they had been acquitted. The public railed about its attacks on freedom, but the database had come in useful more than once for identifying a body, among other things.

They would find out who Nick was soon enough, but someone was making it difficult for them, and Banks wondered why. Would knowing the victim’s identity point the police quickly in the direction of the killer? Did he need time to make his escape?

It was clear that only one of the two bedrooms had been used. The beds weren’t even made up in the other. From what Banks could see at a cursory glance, it looked as if both sides of the double bed had been slept on, but Nick might have been a restless sleeper. Peter Darby had already photographed the room, and the SOCOs would bag the sheets for testing. There was no sign of condoms in any of the bedside drawers, or anywhere else, for that matter, and nothing at all to show who, or what, the mysterious Nick had been, except for the paperback copy of Ian McEwan’s Atonement on the bedside table.

According to the Waterstone’s bookmark, Nick had got to page sixty-eight. Banks picked up the book and flipped through it. On the back endpaper, someone had written in faint pencil six uneven rows of figures, some of them circled. He turned to the front and saw the price of the book, £3.50, also in pencil, but in a different hand, at the top right of the first inside page. A secondhand book, then. Which meant that any number of people might have owned it and written the figures in the back. Still, it might mean something. Banks called up a SOCO to bag it and told him to be sure to make a photocopy of the page in question.

Frustrated by this early lack of knowledge of the victim, Banks went back downstairs. Usually he had a person’s books or CD collection to go on, not to mention the opinions of others, but this time all he knew was that Nick did the Independent crossword, was reading Atonement, was polite but not particularly chatty, favored casual clothing, perhaps suffered from indigestion, smoked Dunhills and wore glasses. It wasn’t anywhere near enough to help start figuring out who might have wanted him dead and why. Patience, he told himself, early days yet, but he didn’t feel patient.

By half past twelve, he’d had enough. Time to go home. Just as he was about to get PC Travers to fix up a lift for him, Annie edged over and said, “There’s not a lot more we can achieve hanging around here, is there?”

“Nothing,” said Banks. “The mechanics are all in motion and Stefan will get in touch with us if anything important comes up, but I doubt we’ll get any further tonight. Why?”

Annie smiled at him. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving and, as I remember, Marks and Spencer’s vegetarian lasagna heats up a treat. You know what they say about an army marching on its stomach and all that.”

Monday, 8th September, 1969

Yvonne Chadwick accepted the joint that Steve passed to her and drew deeply. She liked getting high. Not the hard stuff, no pills or needles, only dope. Sex was all right, too, she liked that well enough with Steve, but most of all she liked getting high, and the two usually went together really well. Music, too. They were listening to Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, and it sounded out of this world.

Take now. She was supposed to be at school, but she had taken the afternoon off. It was only games and free periods, anyway; the new term hadn’t really got under way yet. There was a house just up the road from her school, on Springfield Mount, where a group of hippies lived: Steve, Todd, Jacqui, American Charlie, and others who came and went. She had become friendly with them after she met Steve upstairs at the Peel, on Boar Lane, one night in April when she’d gone there with her friend Lorraine from school. She had just turned sixteen the month before, but she could pass for eighteen easily enough with a bit of makeup and high heels. Steve was the handsome, sensitive sort of boy, and she had fancied him straightaway. He’d read her some of his poetry, and while she didn’t really understand it, she could tell that it sounded important.

There were other houses she visited where people were into the same things, too – one on Carberry Place and another on Bayswater Terrace. Yvonne felt that she could turn up at any one of them at any time and feel as if she really belonged there. Everyone accepted her just as she was. Someone was always around to welcome her, maybe with a joint and a pot of jasmine tea. They all liked the same music, too, and agreed about society and the evils of the war and stuff. But Springfield Mount was the closest, and Steve lived there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, 8th September, 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t speculate on that. You can see as well as I can, though, that there appear to be no other injuries to the surface of the body apart from that light bruising on the neck, which tells me someone held her in a stranglehold with his right arm while he stabbed her with his left. We’ll be testing for drugs, too, of course – it’s possible she was slipped something that immobilized her: Nembutal, Tuinal, something like that. But she was standing when she was stabbed – the angles tell us that much – so she must have been conscious.”

Chadwick looked down at the body. Dr. O’Neill was right. Apart from the faint discoloration on her neck and the mess around her left breast, she was in almost pristine condition: no cuts, no rope burns, nothing.

“Was he taller than her?” Chadwick asked.

“Yes, judging by the shape and position of the bruises and the angle of the cuts, I’d estimate by a good six inches. She was five foot four, which makes him at least five foot ten.”

“Would you say the bruising indicates a struggle?”

“Not necessarily. As you can see, it’s fairly mild. He could simply have had his arm loosely around her neck, then tightened it when he stabbed her. It probably all happened so quickly he didn’t need to restrain her. We already know there are no defensive wounds to the hands, which indicates she was taken by surprise. If that’s the case, she would have slumped as she died, and his arm could have caused the bruising then.”

“I thought bodies didn’t bruise after death.”

“This would have been the moment before death, or at the moment of death.” Dr. O’Neill turned his attention to the golden hair between the girl’s legs and Chadwick felt himself tense. So like Yvonne’s when he had seen her naked that time by accident at the caravan. How embarrassed they had both felt.

“Again,” said Dr. O’Neill, “we’ll have to do swabs and further tests, but there doesn’t appear to be any sign of sexual activity. There’s no bruising around the vaginal areas or the anus.”

“So you’re saying she wasn’t raped, she didn’t have sex?”

“I’m not committing myself to anything yet,” said Dr. O’Neill sharply. “Not until I’ve done an internal examination and the samples have been analyzed. All I’m saying is there are no obvious superficial signs of forced or rough sexual activity. One thing we did find was a tampon. It looks as if our victim was menstruating at the time of the murder.”

“Which still doesn’t rule out sexual activity altogether?”

“Not at all. But if she did have sex, she had time to put another tampon in before she was killed.”

Chadwick thought for a moment. If sex had been the reason for her death, then surely there would have been more signs of violence, unless they had been lovers to begin with. Had they made love first, then dressed, and while she was leaning back on him in the afterglow, he killed her? But why, if sex had been consensual? Had she, perhaps, refused, said she was having her period, and had that somehow angered her attacker? Were they really dealing with a nutcase?

As often as not, Chadwick knew, investigations, including the medical kind, threw up more questions than answers, and it was only through answering them that you made progress.

Chadwick watched as O’Neill and his assistant made the Y incision and peeled back the skin, muscle and soft tissues from the chest wall before pulling the chest flap up over her face and cutting through the rib cage with an electric saw. The smell was overwhelming. Raw meat. Lamb, mostly, Chadwick thought.

“Hmm, it’s as I suspected,” said Dr. O’Neill. “The chest cavity is filled with blood, as are all the other cavities. Massive internal bleeding.”

“Would she have died quickly?”

Dr. O’Neill probed around and remained silent a few minutes, then he said, “From the state of her, seconds at most. Look here. He twisted the knife so sharply he actually cut off a piece of her heart.”

Chadwick looked. As usual, he wished he could see what Dr. O’Neill did, but all he saw was a mass of glistening, bloody organ tissue. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

Dr. O’Neill’s assistant carefully started removing the inner organs for sectioning, further testing and examination. Barring any glaring anomalies, Chadwick knew it would be a few days before he received the results of all this. There was no real reason to stick around, and he had more than enough things to do. He left just as Dr. O’Neill started up the saw to cut through the victim’s skull and remove her brain.

Saturday morning dawned fresh and clear, and Helmthorpe had that rinsed and scoured look; the streets, limestone buildings and flagstone roofs still dark with rain, but the sun out, the sky blue and a cool wind to rattle the bare branches.

Banks fiddled with the attachment that let him play the iPod through the car stereo and was rewarded by Judy Collins singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” in a voice of such aching beauty and clarity that it made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. Sandy Denny’s lyrics had never seemed so doom-laden; they made him think about his brother Roy. Almost as a rebuke, it seemed, the Porsche coursed smoothly and powerfully through the late-autumn landscape.

After she had eaten the lasagna and drunk one small glass of wine, Annie had driven off to Harkside and left Banks to his own devices. It was after two in the morning, but he had poured himself a glass of Amarone and listened to Fischer-Dieskau’s 1962 Winterreise in the dark before heading for bed with a head full of gloomy thoughts. Even then he hadn’t been able to sleep. It was partly heartburn from eating so late – he wished he had taken one of Nick’s antacids, as he had none in the house – and partly disturbing dreams during those brief moments when he did nod off. Several times he awoke abruptly with his heart pounding and a vague, terrifying image skittering away down the slippery slopes of his subconscious. He had lain there taking slow, deep breaths until he had fallen asleep about an hour before the alarm went off.

The team gathered in the boardroom, crime scene photos pinned to the corkboard, but the whiteboard was conspicuously empty apart from the name, “Nick.” An incident van had been dispatched to Fordham earlier in the morning, fitted out with phones and computers. Information collected there would be collated and passed on to headquarters. Banks was officially the Senior Investigating Officer, appointed by Assistant Chief Constable Ron McLaughlin, and Annie was his deputy. Other tasks would be assigned to various officers according to their skills.

Since Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe had retired two months ago, they had been given a temporary replacement in Catherine Gervaise. There were those who muttered that Banks should have got the job, but he knew it had never been on the cards. He had got on well enough with ACC McLaughlin, “Red Ron,” and with the chief constable himself, on those rare occasions when they met, but he was too much of a loose cannon. If nothing else, running off to London to look for his brother, and getting involved in all that followed from that, had put several nails in the coffin of his career. Besides, he didn’t want the responsibility, or the paperwork. Gristhorpe had always left him alone to work cases the way he wanted, which meant he ended up doing a lot of the legwork and streetwork himself, because that was the way he liked it.

Catherine Gervaise was cool and distant, not a mentor and friend the way Gristhorpe had been, and under her rule he found that he had to fight harder for his privileges. She was an administrator through and through, an ambitious woman who had risen quickly through the ranks via accelerated-promotion schemes, management and computer courses and, some said, by affirmative action. This would be her first major investigation at Western Area Headquarters, so it would be interesting to see how she handled it. At least she wasn’t stupid, Banks thought, and she should know how best to use her resources.

Some were put off by her posh accent and Cheltenham Ladies’ College background, but Banks was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, as long as she left him alone. The one thing they had in common, he discovered, was that she also had season tickets to Opera North, and he had seen her at a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor with her husband. He didn’t think she had noticed him. At least, she hadn’t let on. In appearance, she wore little makeup and was rather severe, with short blond hair, rather unexpected cupid’s-bow lips and a trim figure. In dress she was conservative, favoring navy suits and white blouses, and in manner she was no-nonsense, remaining aloof and either not getting the squad room humor, or not wishing to show that she did.

The superintendent asked for a summary of what they had so far, which wasn’t much. The blood-spatter analysis was consistent with the theory that Nick had been bashed over the back of the head with a poker as he had been turning away from his killer, perhaps walking toward his cigarettes. After that, he had been hit once or twice more – they wouldn’t know until Dr. Glendenning performed the postmortem – no doubt to make sure he was dead.

“Have we got any further identifying the victim?” Superintendent Gervaise asked next.

“A little, ma’am,” said Winsome. “At least the local memory tag on his license plate number indicates the car was registered in London.”

“It’s not hired?”

“No. We finally got a look inside with the help of the garage. Unfortunately, there was nothing inside to indicate who he was, either.”

“So someone really wanted to throw sand in our eyes.”

“Well, ma’am, it’s a fairly new car, and he might not have been the kind of person who lives out of it, but it certainly looks that way. Whoever did it must have known he could only have slowed the investigation down, though.” Winsome looked at Banks, who nodded for her to go on. “Which probably means that he wanted to give himself a bit of time to get far enough away and arrange an alibi.”

“Interesting theory, DC Jackman,” said Gervaise. “But that’s all it is, isn’t it, a theory?”

“Yes, ma’am. For the moment.”

“And we need facts.”

That was pretty much self-evident in any investigation, Banks thought. Of course you wanted facts, but until you got them you played around with theories, you used what you did have, then you applied a bit of imagination, and as often as not you came up with an approximation of the truth, which was what he thought Winsome was doing. So Ms. Gervaise wanted to establish herself as a just-the-facts, no-fancy-theories kind of superintendent. Well, so be it. The squad would soon learn to keep their theories to themselves, but Banks hoped her attitude wouldn’t completely crush their creativity, and wouldn’t stop them from confiding their theories in him. It was all very well to come in with an attitude, but it was another thing if that attitude destroyed the delicate balance that had already been achieved over time.

They were drastically short of DCs, having recently lost Gavin Rickerd, their best office manager, to the new neighborhood policing initiative, where he was working with community support officers and specials to tackle the antisocial behavior that was becoming increasingly the norm all over the country, especially on a Saturday night in Eastvale. Gavin hadn’t been replaced yet, and in his absence the job this time had gone to one of the uniformed constables, hardly the ideal choice, but the best they could do right now.

Banks wanted Winsome Jackman and Kev Templeton doing what they did best – tracking down information and following leads – and when it came to that, Detective Sergeant Hatchley had always been a bit slow and lazy. His physical presence used to help intimidate the odd suspect or two, but these days the ex-rugby player’s muscle had gone mostly to fat, and the police weren’t allowed to intimidate villains anymore. Villains’ Rights had put paid to that, or so it sometimes seemed, especially since a burglar had fallen off the roof of a warehouse he had broken into last summer, then sued the owner for damages and won.

“I’m trying to get in touch with the DVLA in Swansea,” Winsome said, “but it’s Saturday. They’re closed and I can’t seem to track down my contact.”

“Keep trying,” said Superintendent Gervaise. “Is there anything else?”

Winsome consulted her notes. “DS Templeton and I interviewed the people in the Cross Keys and took statements. Nothing new there. And when the lights came on we made a quick check of their outer clothing for signs of blood. There were none.”

“What’s your take on this?” Gervaise asked Banks.

“I don’t have enough facts yet to form an opinion,” Banks said.

The irony wasn’t lost on Superintendent Gervaise, who pursed her lips. She looked as if she had just bitten into a particularly vinegary pickle. Banks noticed Annie look away and smile to herself, pen against her lips, shaking her head slowly.

“I understand you entered a licensed premises during the early stages of the investigation yesterday evening,” Gervaise said.

“That’s right.” Banks wondered who had been talking, and why.

“I suppose you know there are regulations governing drinking whilst on duty?”

“With all due respect,” Banks said, “I didn’t go there for a drink. I went to question possible witnesses.”

“But you did have a drink?”

“While I was there, yes. I find it puts people at ease. They see you as more like they are, not as the enemy.”

“Duly noted,” said Gervaise dryly. “And did you find any cooperative witnesses?”

“Nobody seemed to know very much about the victim,” Banks said. “He was renting a cottage, not a local.”

“On holiday at this time of year?”

“That’s what I wondered about.”

“Find out what he was doing there. That might help us get to the bottom of this.”

Quite the one for dishing out obvious orders, was Superintendent Gervaise, Banks thought. He’d had bosses like that before: State the obvious, the things your team would do anyway, without even being asked, and take the credit for the results. “Of course,” he said. “We’re working on it. One of the staff might know a bit more than she’s letting on.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Her manner, body language.”

“All right. Question her. Bring her in, if necessary.”

Banks could tell by Superintendent Gervaise’s clipped tone and the way her hand strayed to her short layered locks that she was getting bored with the meeting and anxious to get away, no doubt to send out a memo on drinking while on duty, or the ten most obvious courses to pursue during a murder inquiry.

“If that’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen,” she went on, stuffing her papers into her briefcase, “then I suggest we all get down to work.”

To a chorus of muttered “Yes, ma’ams” she left the room, heels clicking against the hardwood floor. Only after she’d gone did Banks realize that he had forgotten to tell her about the figures in the book.

Monday, 8th September, 1969

Janet was watching The News at Ten when Chadwick got home that evening, and Reginald Bosanquet was talking about ITA’s exciting new UHF color transmissions from the Crystal Palace transmitter, which was all very well, Chadwick thought, if you happened to own a color TV. He didn’t. Not on a DI’s pay of a little over two thousand pounds per year. Janet walked toward him.

“Hard day?” she asked.

Chadwick nodded, kissed her and sat down in his favorite armchair.

“Drink?”

“A small whiskey would go down nicely. Yvonne not home yet?” He glanced at the clock. Twenty past ten.

“Not yet.”

“Know where she is?”

Janet turned from pouring the whiskey. “Out with friends was all she said.”

“She shouldn’t go out so often on school nights. She knows that.”

Janet handed him the drink. “She’s sixteen. We can’t expect her to do everything the way we’d like it. Things are different these days. Teenagers have a lot more freedom.”

“Freedom? As long as she’s under this roof we’ve a right to expect some degree of honesty and respect from her, haven’t we?” Chadwick argued. “The next thing you know she’ll be dropping out and running off to live in a hippie commune. Freedom.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Stan. She’s going through a stage, that’s all.” Janet softened her tone. “She’ll get over it. Weren’t you just a little bit rebellious when you were sixteen?”

Chadwick tried to remember. He didn’t think so. It was 1937 when he was sixteen, before “teenagers” had been invented, when youth was simply an unfortunate period one had to pass through on the route from childhood to maturity. Another world. George VI was crowned king that year, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister and looked likely to get along well with Hitler, and the Spanish Civil War was at its bloodiest. But Chadwick had paid only scant attention to world affairs. He was at grammar school then, on a scholarship, playing rugby with the first fifteen, and all set for a university career that was interrupted by the war and somehow never got resurrected.

He had volunteered for the Green Howards in 1940 because his father had served with them in the First World War, and spent the next five years killing first Japanese, then Germans, while trying to stay alive himself. After it was all over and he was back on civvy street in his demob suit, it took him six years to get over it. Six years of dead-end jobs, bouts of depression, loneliness and hunger. He nearly died of cold in the bitter winter of 1947. Then it was as if the weight suddenly lifted, and the lights came on. He joined the West Riding Constabulary in 1951. The following year he met Janet at a dance. They were married only three months later, and a year after that, in March 1953, Yvonne was born.

Rebellious? He didn’t think so. It seemed to be a young person’s lot in life to go off to war back then, just like the generation before him, and in the army you obeyed orders. He’d got into minor mischief like all the other kids, smoking before he was old enough, the odd bit of shoplifting, sneaking drinks from his father’s whiskey bottle, replacing what he’d drunk with water. He also got into the occasional scrap. But one thing he didn’t dare do was disobey his parents. If he had stayed out all night without permission, his father would have beaten him black and blue.

Chadwick grunted. He didn’t suppose Janet really wanted an answer; she was just trying to ease the way for Yvonne’s arrival home, which he hoped would be soon.

The news finished at ten forty-five and the late-night “X” film came on. Normally Chadwick wouldn’t bother watching such rubbish, but this week it was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which he and Janet had seen at the Lyric about eight years ago, and he didn’t mind watching it again. At least it was the sort of life he could understand, real life, not long-haired kids listening to loud music and taking drugs.

It was about quarter past eleven when he heard the front door open and shut. By that time, his anger had edged over into concern, but in a parent the two are often so intermingled as to be indistinguishable.

“Where have you been?” he asked Yvonne when she walked into the living room in her pale blue bell-bottomed jeans and red cheesecloth top with white-and-blue embroidery down the gathered front. Her eyes looked a little bleary, but other than that she seemed all right.

“That’s a nice welcome,” she said.

“Are you going to answer me?”

“If you must know, I’ve been to the Grove.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down past the station, by the canal.”

“And what goes on there?”

“Nothing goes on. It’s folk night on Mondays. People sing folk songs and read poetry.”

“You know you’re not old enough to drink.”

“I wasn’t drinking. Not alcohol, anyway.”

“You smell of smoke.”

“It’s a pub, Dad. People were smoking. Look, if all you’re going to do is go on at me like this, I’m off to bed. It’s a school day tomorrow, or didn’t you know?”

“Enough of your cheek! You’re too young to be hanging around pubs in town. God knows who-”

“If it was up to you I wouldn’t have any friends at all, would I? And I’d never go anywhere. You make me sick!”

And with that Yvonne stomped upstairs to her room.

Chadwick made to follow her, but Janet grabbed his arm. “No, Stan. Not now. Let’s not have another flaming row. Not tonight.”

Furious as he felt, Chadwick realized she was right. Besides, he was exhausted. Not the best time to get into a long argument with his daughter. But he’d have it out with her tomorrow. Find out what she was up to, where she had been all Sunday night, exactly what crowd she was hanging around with. Even if he had to follow her.

He could hear her banging about upstairs, using the toilet and the bathroom, slamming her bedroom door, making a point of it. It was impossible to get back into the film now. Impossible to go to sleep, too, no matter how tired he felt. If he’d had a dog he would have taken it for a walk. Instead he poured himself another small whiskey, and while Janet pretended to read her Woman’s Weekly he pretended to watch Saturday Night and Sunday Morning until all was silent upstairs and it was safe to go to bed.