“I heard he was tough, and he certainly looks that way.”
“I never knew him personally, but I managed to turn up a couple of retired officers who did. He was a hard man, by all accounts, but fair and honest, and he got results. He had a strong Scottish Presbyterian background, but one of his old colleagues told me he thought he’d lost his faith during the war. Hardly bloody surprising when you consider the poor sod saw action in Burma and was part of the D-day invasion.”
“Where is he now?”
They waited until the lights changed, then crossed Vicar Lane. “Dead,” Blackstone said finally. “According to our personnel records, Stanley Chadwick died in March 1973.”
“So young?” said Banks. “That must have been a hell of a shock for all concerned. He would only have been in his early fifties.”
“Apparently, his health had been in decline for a couple of years,” Blackstone said. “He’d had a lot of sick time, and performancewise there were rumors that he was dragging his feet. He retired due to ill health in late 1972.”
“That seems a rather sudden decline,” Banks said. “Any speculation as to what it was?”
“Well, it wasn’t murder, if that’s what you’re thinking. He had a history of heart problems, hereditary, apparently, which had gone untreated, perhaps even unnoticed, for years. He died in his sleep of a heart attack. But you have to remember, this is just from the files and the memory of a couple of old men I managed to track down. And some of the old information is impossible to locate. We moved here from Brotherton House in 1976, which was well before my time, and inevitably stuff went missing in the move, so your guess is as good as mine as to the rest.”
Simon Bradley had told Banks he’d heard Chadwick wasn’t in good health, but Banks hadn’t realized things were that bad. Could there have been anything suspicious about his death? First Linda Lofthouse, then Robin Merchant, then Stanley Chadwick? Banks couldn’t imagine what linked them to one another. Chadwick had investigated the Lofthouse case, but had had nothing to do with Merchant’s drowning. He had, however, met the Mad Hatters at Swainsview Lodge, and Vic Greaves was Linda Lofthouse’s cousin. There had to be something he was missing. Maybe Chadwick’s daughter, Yvonne, would help, if he could find her.
They turned down Briggate, a pedestrian precinct. There were plenty of shoppers in evidence, many of them young people, teenage girls pushing prams, the boys with them looking too young and inexperienced to be fathers. Many of the girls looked too young to be mothers, too, but Banks knew damn well they weren’t merely helping out their big sisters. Teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were at appallingly high rates.
Because he still had Linda Lofthouse and Nick Barber on his mind, Banks thought back to the sixties, to what the media had dubbed the “sexual revolution.” True, the pill had made it possible for women to have sex without fear of pregnancy, but it had also left them with little or no excuse not to have sex. In the name of liberation, women were expected to sleep around; they had the freedom to do so, the reasoning went, so they should, and there was subtle and not so subtle cultural and peer pressure on them to do so. After all, the worst anyone could get was crabs or a dose of clap, so sex was relatively fear-free.
But there were plenty of unwanted pregnancies back then, too, Banks remembered, as not all girls were on the pill, or willing to have abortions, certainly in the provinces. Linda Lofthouse had been one of them, and Norma Coulton, just down the street from where Banks lived, was another. Banks remembered the gossip and the dirty looks she got when she walked into the newsagent’s. He wondered what had happened to her and her child. At least he knew what had happened to Linda Lofthouse’s son; he had met the same fate as his mother.
“Any idea what happened to Chadwick’s family?” he asked.
“According to what I could find out, he had a wife called Janet and a daughter called Yvonne. Both survived him, but nobody’s kept tabs on them. I don’t suppose it would be too difficult to track them down. Pensions or Human Resources might be able to help.”
“Do what you can,” said Banks. “I appreciate it. And I’ll put Winsome on it at our end. She’s good at that sort of thing. The daughter may have married, changed her name, of course, but we’ll give it a try: electoral rolls, DVLA, PNC and the rest. Who knows, we might get lucky before we have to resort to more time consuming methods.”
They passed a thin bearded young man selling the Big Issue at the entrance to Thornton’s Arcade. Blackstone bought a copy, folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket. Two young policemen passed them, both wearing black helmets and bulletproof vests and carrying Heckler amp; Koch carbines.
“It’s a fact of the times here, I’m afraid,” said Blackstone.
Banks nodded. What bothered him most was that the officers looked only about fifteen.
“Sorry I’m not being a lot of help,” Blackstone went on.
“Nonsense,” said Banks. “You’re helping me fill in the picture, and that’s all I need right now. I know I’ll have to read the files and the trial transcripts soon, but I keep putting it off because those things bore me so much.”
“You can do that in my office after we’ve had a bite to eat. I have to go out. I know what you mean, though. I’d rather curl up with a good Flash-man or Sharpe, myself.” Blackstone stopped at the end of an alley. “Let’s try the Ship this time. Whitelocks is always too damned crowded these days, and they’ve changed the menu. It’s getting too trendy. And somehow I don’t see you sitting out in the Victoria Quarter at the Harvey Nichols café eating a garlic-and-Brie frittata.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Banks. “You’d be surprised. I scrub up quite nicely, and I don’t mind a bit of foreign grub every now and then. But the Ship sounds fine.”
They ordered pints of Tetley’s, and Banks chose the giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausages and gravy and sat down in the dim brass and dark wood interior. Blackstone stuck with his beer.
Banks told Blackstone about their troublesome new superintendent and the fact that Templeton might be bringing in just too many apples for the teacher. Then he chatted about Brian and his new girlfriend Emilia turning up till their food came and they got back to Stanley Chadwick and Linda Lofthouse.
“Do you think I’m tilting at windmills, Ken?” Banks asked.
“It wouldn’t be the first time, but I don’t have enough to go on to advise you on that score. Usually your windmills turn out to be all too human. Explain your reasoning.”
Banks sipped some beer, trying to put his thoughts in order. It was a useful, if difficult, exercise. “There isn’t much, really,” he said. “Superintendent Gervaise thinks the past is over and the guilty have been punished, but I’m not so sure. It’s not that I think Vic Greaves is a killer because he has mental problems. Christ, it might even be Chris Adams, for all I know. He doesn’t live that far away. Or even Tania Hutchison. It’s not as if Oxfordshire’s on the moon, either. I just think that if Nick Barber was as good and as thorough a music journalist as everyone says he was, then he might have struck a nerve, and Vic Greaves is one of the few people he had tried to speak to about the story before his murder. I’ve also just discovered that Nick was Linda Lofthouse’s son, adopted at birth by the Barbers, and that he found out who his birth mother was about five years ago. Barber was a journalist, and I think he simply tried to find out as much about her and her times as he could because he was already interested in the music and the period. One thing he found out was that Vic Greaves was her cousin. Greaves also lives only walking distance away from Barber’s rented cottage, and someone saw a figure running around at the time of the murder. The only things I can find in the past that cast any sort of suspicions on Greaves and the others are the murder of Linda Lofthouse, because she was backstage at the Brimleigh Festival with Tania Hutchison, and she was Greaves’s cousin, and the drowning of the Mad Hatters’ bassist, Robin Merchant, when Greaves, Adams and Tania Hutchison were all present at Swainsview Lodge. And they’re both closed cases.”