“Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel? Lovers kill each other all the time, Stan. You know that.”

“Yes, but they’re usually a bit more obvious about it. Like I said, this has more deliberate elements. The killer stood behind her, for a start.”

“So she’s leaning back on him. She felt safe. What about her boyfriend?”

“Didn’t have one, so far as we know. She had an ex-boyfriend, Donald Hughes, but his alibi checks out. He was working most of the night on a rush job at the garage where he works, and he wouldn’t have had time to go anywhere near Brimleigh.”

“Someone else close to her, then?”

“I suppose there’s a chance she knew her killer,” Chadwick admitted, “that it was someone she felt familiar with, felt comfortable with. Why he did it is another matter entirely. But to find out any more we need to track down her friends.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything but I’ll see what I can do,” said Broome. “Good Lord, is that the time? Must dash. I have to see a man about a shipment of Dexedrine.”

“All go, isn’t it?”

“You can say that again. What’s next on your agenda? Why so gloomy?”

“I’ve got an appointment with their royal majesties the Mad Hatters this afternoon,” Chadwick said.

“Lucky you. Maybe they’ll give you a free LP.”

“They know what they can do with it.”

“Think of Yvonne, though, Stan. You’d be golden in her eyes, you met the Mad Hatters and got a signed LP.”

“Get away with you.”

“I’ll come back to you about the house,” Broome said, then left.

Broome’s cigarette butt still smoldered in the ashtray. Chadwick put it out. That made his fingers smell of smoke, so he went to the toilet and washed them before sitting down to finish his drink. He could hear a group of students in the lounge laughing over Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” on the jukebox, a song Chadwick actually quite liked when he heard it on the radio. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get a signed LP for Yvonne, he thought, then immediately dismissed the idea. A lot of good that would do for his authority, begging a bunch of drug-addled layabouts for their autographs.

Chadwick tried to picture the twenty-five thousand kids at the Brimleigh Festival all sitting in the dark listening to a loud band on a distant lit-up stage. He knew he could narrow his range of suspects if he tried hard enough, especially now that he had a more accurate idea of the time of the murder. For a start, Rick Hayes was still holding something back, he was certain of it. The candid photographs proved that Linda Lofthouse had been in the backstage area, and that she had talked with two members of the Mad Hatters, among others. Hayes must have known this, but he didn’t say anything. Why? Was he protecting someone? On the other hand, Chadwick remembered that Hayes himself was left-handed, like the killer, so if he knew more than he was telling…

Still, he admonished himself, no point in too much theorizing ahead of the facts. Imagination had never been his forte, and he had seen enough to know that the details of the murder did not necessarily give any clues as to the killer’s state of mind, or to his relationship with the victim. People were capable of strange and wondrous behavior, and some of it was murderous. He finished his pint and went back to the station. He would get DC Bradley to give the boffins a gentle nudge while he went out to Swainsview Lodge with young Enderby.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Banks hadn’t been to London since Roy’s death, or since the terrible tube and bus suicide bombings that summer, and he was surprised, getting off the GNER InterCity at King’s Cross that lunchtime, at how just being there brought a lump to his throat. It was partly Roy, of course, and partly some deep-rooted sense of outrage at what the place had suffered.

King’s Cross Station was the usual throng of travelers standing gazing up at the boards like people looking for alien spacecraft. There was nowhere to sit; that was the problem. The station authorities didn’t want to encourage people to hang around the station; they had enough problems with terrorists, teenage prostitution and drugs as it was. So they let the poor buggers stand while they waited for their trains.

A uniformed constable met Banks and Annie at the side exit, as arranged, and whisked them in a patrol car through the streets of central London to Cromwell Road and along the Great West Road, past the roadside graffiti-scored concrete-and-glass towers of Hammersmith to Nick Barber’s Chiswick flat, not far from Fuller’s Brewery. It was a modern brick low-rise building, three stories in all, and Barber had lived at the top in one of the corner units. The police locksmith was waiting for them.

When the paperwork had been completed and handed over, the lock yielded so quickly to the smith’s ministrations that Banks wondered whether he had once used his skills to less legitimate ends.

Banks and Annie found themselves standing in a room with purple walls, on which hung a number of prints of famous psychedelic poster art: Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall at Winterland, 1 February, 1968; Buffalo Springfield at the Fillmore Auditorium, 21 December, 1967; the Mad Hatters at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, 6 October, 1968. Mixed with these were a number of framed sixties album covers: Cheap Thrills, Disraeli Gears, Blind Faith, Forever Changes and Sir Peter Blake’s infamous Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Custom shelving held a formidable collection of CDs and LPs, and the stereo equipment was top of the line Bang amp; Olufsen, as were the Bose headphones resting by the leather armchair.

There were far too many CDs to browse through, but on a cursory glance Banks noticed a prevalence of late-sixties to early-seventies rock, stopping around Bowie and Roxy Music, and including some bands he hadn’t thought of in years, like Atomic Rooster, Quintessence, Dr. Strangely Strange and Amazing Blondel. There was also a smattering of jazz, mostly Miles, ’Trane and Mingus, along with a fair collection of J. S. Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart.

One shelf was devoted to magazines and newspapers in which Nick Barber had published reviews or features, and quickie rock bios. Some recent correspondence, mostly bills and junk mail, sat on a small worktable under the window. There was no desktop computer, Banks noticed, which probably meant Barber did all his work on the fly on his laptop, which had been taken.

The bedroom was tidy and functional, with a neatly made double bed and a wardrobe full of clothes, much the same as the ones he’d had with him in Yorkshire: casual and not too expensive. There was nothing to indicate any interests other than music, apart from the bookshelves, which reflected fairly catholic tastes in modern fiction, from Amis to Wodehouse, with a few popular science-fiction, horror and crime novels mixed in – Philip K. Dick, Ramsey Campbell, Derek Raymond, James Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Elroy and George Pelecanos. The rest were books about rock and roll: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Peter Guralnick.

A filing cabinet in a corner of the bedroom held copies of contracts, lists and reviews of concerts attended, expense sheets and drafts of articles, all of which would have to be taken away and examined in detail. For the moment, though, Banks found what he needed to know in a brief note in the “Current” file referring to “the matter we discussed” and urging Barber to go ahead and get started. It also reminded him that they didn’t pay expenses up front. The notepaper was headed with the MOJO logo and an address at Mappin House, on Winsley Street in the West End. It was dated 1st October, just a couple of weeks before Nick Barber left for Yorkshire.

There were several messages on Nick’s answering machine: two from an anxious girlfriend, who left him her work number, said she hadn’t seen him for a while and wanted to get together for a drink; another from a mate about tickets to a Kasabian concert; and one offering the deal of the century on double-glazing. As far as Banks could see, Nick Barber had kept his life clean and tidy and taken most of it with him on the road. Now it had disappeared.