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.