Piece of My Heart (23 page)

“I understand there were caravans for some of the stars.”

“People need privacy. And, you know, if you wanted somewhere to go and…Well, I don’t have to spell it out, do I?”

“Did you go to a caravan with anyone?”

Her eyes widened and her skin flushed. “That’s hardly a question a gentleman would ask of a lady. And I can’t see as it has any bearing on what happened to Linda.”

“So nobody needed to go into the woods for privacy?”

“No. It was like we had our own little community, and there was no one there to lay down the law, to tell us what to do. A perfect anarchist state.”

Chadwick thought that was something of a contradiction in terms, but he didn’t bother pointing it out. He didn’t want to get sidetracked again. “Who did you spend your time with?” he asked.

“Lots of people. I suppose I was with Chris Adams a fair bit. He’s the Hatters’ manager. A nice guy. Smart
and
sensitive.” She smiled. “And not too stoned to have a decent conversation with.”

Interesting, Chadwick thought, that Adams hadn’t mentioned this. But why would he? It would only connect him with events from which he wanted to distance himself and his group. “Were you with him during Led Zeppelin’s performance?”

Tania frowned. “No. I was out front, in the press enclosure. I suppose he might have been there, but it was really crowded and dark. I don’t remember seeing him.”

“You’re American, I understand,” Chadwick said.

“Canadian, actually. But a lot of people make that mistake. And don’t worry, I’m here legally, work permit and all. My
parents were born here. Scotland. Strathclyde. My father was a professor at the university there.”

A professor’s daughter, no less. And no doubt they had moved to Canada because he was better paid over there. Even less reason, then, for Tania to be spending her days in a tiny, shabby bedsit in Notting Hill. “So what about Linda?” he asked. “Did she disappear into any caravans?”

“Not that I saw. Look, Linda got a bit claustrophobic, developed a headache, and when Led Zeppelin came on, she told me she was going for a walk in the woods. I told her I’d probably be heading back home as soon as they finished because I wanted to catch a bit of sleep before taking the ferry over to see my boyfriend, Jeff. She told me not to worry about her, she had friends she could stay with. I knew that. I’d been up with her before and met them. It was a place in Leeds, where she used to live before she moved to London.”

“Bayswater Terrace?”

“That sounds right.”

“So she told you she would stay there?”

“Not in so many words. Only that she wasn’t planning on heading back to London with me that night.”

“Any reason?”

“I guess there were just people she wanted to see. I mean, it was where she came from. Home, I guess.”

“Did you see any of these people from the house with her at the festival?”

“No. Like I said, we had backstage passes. We were in with the bands. We didn’t know anybody there apart from Vic, Robin, Chris and the rest. Didn’t even know them very well. Look, as you can imagine, it got a bit wild at times, like all parties do. Linda slipped away. I didn’t see her again.”

“Did she have a flower painted on her face when she left you?”

Tania looked puzzled. “Flower? I don’t think so. I don’t know. It was dark. I don’t remember.”

“Would you have noticed?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Lots of girls had flowers painted on their faces. Is it important?”

“It could be.” Chadwick remembered Robin Merchant saying that Linda
did
have the flower on her face when he last saw her. “How was she going to get to Leeds? It was the middle of the night.”

“Hitch a ride. There were plenty of people heading that way. Most of the crowd came from Leeds or Bradford. Stands to reason.”

“Was this your original plan? For her to stay in Leeds, hitch a ride?”

“Plan? We didn’t have a plan. It was all pretty spontaneous. I mean, she knew I was going to Paris on Monday and I had to drive back Sunday night, but she also knew she could come back down to London with me in the Mini if she wanted.”

“And what did you do?”

“After Zeppelin finished, I went round the back again, hung around a while and waited for her. There was still a party going on backstage, but people were leaving fast. I didn’t see her, so I assumed she’d headed off to Bayswater Terrace. I got in my car and drove back down here. It was about four in the morning by the time I left, and I got home about nine. I slept till two, then drove to Dover and took the ferry to Calais.”

“You must have been tired.”

“Not really.”

“Don’t you have a job?”

“I’m between jobs. I’m a temp. I happened to be good at typing at school. I can choose my own hours now.”

“But what about education? You said your father was a professor. Surely he would want you to go to university?”

She gave him a curious, almost pitying look. “What my father wants doesn’t come into it,” she said. “It’s my life. I might go to university one day, but it’ll be when I want to, not when someone else decides for me.” Tania shook her hair back and lit another cigarette.

Chadwick thought he saw a mouse scurry across the kitchen floor. He gave a little shudder. It wasn’t that mice scared him, but the idea of living with them held no appeal. “I’d like to know more about Linda,” he said. “I understand she was a shopgirl?”

Tania laughed. “‘Shopgirl.’ How very quaint and English. I suppose you could say that. She worked at Biba, but she wanted to be a designer. She was good, too.”

“Wouldn’t they be worried about her not coming back?”

“She took the week off.”

“So there was a plan?”

“There were possibilities, that’s all. There were some people in St. Ives she wanted to see. Maybe she was going to stay in Leeds a few days, see her friends and her mother and then go down there. I don’t know. She also had a friend living on Anglesey she wanted to visit. What can I say? Linda was a spontaneous sort of person. She just did things. That’s why I wasn’t worried about her. Besides, you don’t think…I mean, we were with people who are into love and peace and all that, and you just don’t expect…” Tears ran down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all too much.”

Chadwick gave her a few minutes to compose herself and
wipe away the tears, then said, “When Linda left the enclosure for the woods, did you see anyone follow her?”

Tania thought for a moment, sucked at her cigarette and flicked some ash. “No,” she said.

“Did you see anyone else go out around that time?”

“Not that I remember. Most of us were excited about Led Zeppelin, getting ready to go round the front and get our minds blown.”

“Could she have arranged to meet someone? Could the headache have been an excuse?”

Tania gave him a blank look. “Why would she? If she’d been going to meet someone, she’d have said so. It wasn’t Linda’s way to be sly and sneaky.”

Christ, Chadwick thought, it was a lot easier when you were dealing with ordinary folk, most of whom lied and cheated as easily as they breathed, rather than this lot with their fancy ideals and high-handed attitudes. “Did you notice anyone paying her undue attention?” he asked.

“Linda’s a beautiful girl. Of course there were people talking to her, maybe trying to make an impression, pick her up.”

“But nobody succeeded?”

Tania paused. “Linda wasn’t seeing anyone this past while,” she answered. “Look, I’ve seen what the newspapers say about us. The
News of the World
, the
People
, trash like that. They paint us as being some sort of drug-addled and sex-crazed subculture, nothing but orgies and excess. Well, some people might be like that, but Linda was a very spiritual person. She was into Buddhism, the Kabbalah, yoga, astrology, tarot, all sorts of spiritual stuff, and sometimes she just…you know…sex wasn’t always a part of it for her.”

“And drugs?”

“Out of the picture, too. I’m not saying she’d never smoked a joint or dropped a tab of acid, but not for a while. She was moving on, evolving.”

“I understand the two of you performed musical duets together?”

Tania looked at him as if she didn’t understand, then managed a brief smile. “
Performed musical duets?
We sang together sometimes, if that’s what you mean, just in folk clubs and such.”

“Can I have a look at Linda’s flat?”

Tania bit her lip. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t. I mean…”

“You can come with me, keep an eye on me. It’ll have to be done eventually. offcially.”

Finally, Tania said, “Okay. I’ve got a key. Come on.”

She led him across the hall. Linda’s room was the same shape as Tania’s, but like a mirror image. It was more luxuriously furnished, with a couple of patterned rugs on the floor and a stylized painting of a man sitting cross-legged under a tree, surrounded by strange symbols, on the wall. Chadwick recognized the signs of the zodiac from the newspaper horoscopes Janet read. There was also a small bookcase full of volumes on mysticism and the spiritual life and packs of variously scented joss sticks. An acoustic guitar, similar to the one in Tania’s room, leaned against the wall.

Linda also had a small record player, and beside it stood a stack of LPs similar to those Yvonne had. There was nothing really personal in the room, at least not that Chadwick could find. One drawer held a couple of letters from her mother and some old photographs taken with her father. There were no diaries or notebooks–whatever she had been carrying with her at Brimleigh had disappeared–and very little else apart from her birth certificate and post-office book showing that
she had £123 13s. 5d. in her account, which seemed rather a lot to Chadwick. She had also set up a sewing machine at a makeshift table, and there were a few bolts of printed fabric lying around. In her small wardrobe hung many long dresses and skirts of bright print fabrics and other materials.

He searched under the drawers and tried the cupboards and wardrobes for false bottoms but found nowhere that might have provided a good hiding place for drugs. If Tania knew this was what he was doing, she didn’t say anything. She just leaned against the door jamb with her arms folded.

As far as food was concerned, the pickings were slim. Linda had no oven, only a gas burner beside the little sink, and the contents of her cupboard consisted of brown rice, chickpeas, muesli, tahini, mung beans and various herbs and spices. There was no refrigerator, either, and no sign of meat, vegetables or dairy products, except for a bottle of sterilized milk on the table. Frugal living indeed.

Frustrated, Chadwick stood by the door and gave one last look around. Still nothing.

“What will happen to it now?” Tania asked.

“I suppose it’ll be relet eventually,” he said. “For the moment I’ll get the local police to come in and seal it off until we’ve done a thorough search. What do you know about Rick Hayes?”

Tania locked Linda’s door and led Chadwick back to her room, where they resumed their previous positions.

“Rick Hayes, the promoter?”

“That’s the one.”

“Nothing much. I chatted with him a couple of times. He’s a bit of a creep. If you must know, he tried to pick me up, suggested we go to his caravan.”

“And?”

“I told him to get lost.”

“How did he react?”

“He laughed and said he liked a girl who spoke her mind. Look, Hayes is one of those men who asks every girl he meets to sleep with him. He thinks the odds are pretty good. If nine out of ten tell him what they think of him, or slap his face, there’s always the tenth who might say yes.”

“He knew Linda, is that right?”

“They’d met before, yes. Once we went backstage at a Mad Hatters concert at the Roundhouse and Rick was there. He’s harmless enough, really. To be honest, he’s far too taken with himself to really give much thought to anyone else.”

“But if someone he wanted turned him down, do you think he could get violent?”

Tania gave him a sharp look. “I…I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it. He’s got a bit of a temper. I saw him laying into one of the security guards, but that was just…I don’t know, some sort of a power trip, I thought. You’re not suggesting he might have killed Linda because she wouldn’t let him fuck her?”

If the word was meant to shock Chadwick, it did. He wasn’t used to such language coming from the mouths of such lovely young women. He was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of a reaction, though. “Did you see him leave the enclosure during the time you were there?”

“No. Mostly he was coordinating with the performers and roadies, making sure the equipment got set up right and everything went smoothly. There were a few problems with the PA system and so on that he also had to deal with. And he acted as emcee, introducing the bands. He was really pretty busy all the time. I don’t think he’d have had a chance to slip away even if he’d wanted to.”

“So he was always in sight?”

“Pretty much. Not always, but most of the time you’d see him out the corner of your eye here and there, running around. There was always somebody wanting him for something.”

“Where was he while Linda was in the woods?”

“I don’t know. Like I told you, I went round to the front to get a good view.”

“Was he there?”

“No. He introduced the band, then he left the stage.”

“Did you see him after that?”

“Come to think of it, no. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he could have had anything to do with what happened.”

“Probably not,” said Chadwick, standing to leave. “It just pays to cover all the angles, that’s all.” He lingered at the door. “Before I leave, tell me how Linda was behaving these past few weeks.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

“No.”

“Was she upset, depressed or worried about anything?”

“No, she was her usual self. She was saving up to go to India. She was really excited about that.”

Chadwick, who had spent time in India before seeing action in Burma during the war, didn’t understand what there was to get excited about. As far as he was concerned, the place was filthy, hot and unsanitary. Still, it explained the reason for the £123 13s. 5d. in her post-office account. “Is that all?”