Aftermath (6 page)

But no. Lucy wanted to stick it out a while longer. At least a little while. Terry was so nice afterwards, so good to her; he bought her presents, flowers, swore he would never do it again, that he would change. It made Maggie sick to hear all this – literally, as she once vomited the minute Lucy left the house – the same damn reasons and excuses she had given herself and those few close friends who knew about her situation all along.

But she listened. What else could she do? Lucy needed a friend, and for better or for worse, Maggie was it.

Now this.

Maggie tossed the last crumbs of bread into the pond. She aimed for the scruffiest, littlest, ugliest duckling of them all, the one way at the back that hadn’t been able to get at the feast so far. It made no difference. The bread landed only inches from his beak, but before he could get to it, the others had paddled over in a ferocious pack and snapped it right from under his mouth.

•

Banks wanted to get a look at the whole interior of thirty-five The Hill before the SOCOs started ripping it apart. He didn’t know what it would tell him, but he needed to get the feel of it.

Downstairs, in addition to the kitchen with its small dining area, there was only a living room, containing a three-piece suite, stereo system, television, video and a small bookcase. Though the room was decorated with the same feminine touch as the hallway – frilly lace curtains, coral pink wallpaper, thick pile carpet, cream ceiling with ornate cornices – the videos in the cabinet under the TV set reflected masculine tastes: action films, tape after tape of
The Simpsons
, a collection of horror and science fiction films, including the whole
Alien
and
Scream
series, along with some true classics such as
The Wicker Man
, the original
Cat People, Curse of the Demon
and a boxed set of David Cronenberg films. Banks poked around but could find no porn, nothing home-made. Maybe the SOCOs would have better luck when they took the house apart. The CDs were an odd mix. There was some classical, mostly Classic FM compilations and a best of Mozart set, but there were also some rap, heavy metal and country and western CDs, too. Eclectic tastes.

The books were also mixed: beauty manuals,
Reader’s Digest
condensed specials, needlecraft techniques, romances, occult and true crime of the more graphic variety, tabloid-style biographies of famous serial killers and mass murderers. The room showed one or two signs of untidiness – yesterday’s evening paper spread over the coffee table, a couple of videos left out of their boxes – but on the whole it was clean and neat. There were also a number of knick-knacks around the place, the sort of things that Banks’s mother wouldn’t have in the house because they made dusting more difficult – porcelain figures of fairy-tale characters and animals. In the dining area stood a large glass-fronted cabinet filled with Royal Doulton chinaware. Probably a wedding present, Banks guessed.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, the smaller one used as a home office, along with a toilet and bathroom. No shower, just sink and tub. Both toilet and bathroom were spotless, the porcelain shining bright, air heavy with the scent of lavender. Banks glanced around the plug-holes but saw only polished chrome, not a trace of blood or hair.

Their computer expert, David Preece, sat in the office clacking away at the computer keys. A large filing cabinet stood in the corner; it would have to be emptied, its contents transferred to the exhibits room at Millgarth.

‘Anything yet, Dave?’ Banks asked.

Preece pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned. ‘Nothing much. Just a few pornographic Web sites book-marked, chat rooms, that sort of thing. Nothing illegal yet, by the looks of it.’

‘Keep at it.’

Banks walked into the master bedroom. The colour scheme seemed to continue the ocean theme, but instead of coral it was sea-blue. Azure? Cobalt? Cerulean? Annie Cabbot would know the exact shade, her father being an artist, but to Banks it was just blue, like the walls of his living room, though a shade or two darker. The queen-size bed was covered by a fluffed-up black duvet. The bedroom suite was assemble-it-yourself blond Scandinavian pine. Another television set stood on a stand at the bottom of the bed. The cabinet held a collection of soft-core porn, if the labels were to believed, but still nothing illegal or home-made, no kiddie stuff or animals. So the Paynes were into porn videos. So what? So were more than half the households in the country, Banks was willing to bet. But more than half the households in the country didn’t go around abducting and killing young girls. Some lucky young DC was going to have to sit down and watch the lot from start to finish to verify that the contents matched the titles.

Banks poked around in the wardrobe: suits, shirts, dresses, shoes – mostly women’s – nothing he wouldn’t have expected. They would all have to be bagged by the SOCOs and examined in minute detail.

There were plenty of knick-knacks in the bedroom, too: Limoges cases, musical jewellery boxes, lacquered, hand-painted boxes. The room took its musky rose and aniseed scent, Banks noticed, from a bowl of pot-pourri on the laundry hamper under the window.

The bedroom faced The Hill, and when Banks parted the lace curtains and looked out of the window he could see the houses atop the rise over the street, half hidden by shrubs and trees. He could also see the activity below, on the street. He turned and looked around the room again, finding it somehow depressing in its absolute sterility. It could have been ordered from a colour supplement and assembled yesterday. The whole house – except for the cellar, of course – had that feel to it: pretty, contemporary, the sort of place where the up-and-coming young middle-class couple about town
should
be living. So ordinary, but empty.

With a sigh, he went back downstairs.

Kelly Diane Matthews
went missing during the New Year’s Eve party in Roundhay Park, Leeds. She was seventeen years old, five feet three inches tall and weighed just seven stone. She lived in Alwoodley and attended Allerton High School. Kelly had two younger sisters: Ashley, aged nine, and Nicola, aged thirteen.

The call to the local police station came in at 9.11 a.m. on the first of January. Mr and Mrs Matthews were worried that their daughter hadn’t come home that night. They had been to a party themselves, and hadn’t arrived back until almost three a.m. They noticed that Kelly wasn’t home yet but weren’t too worried because she was with friends, and they knew that these new year parties were likely to go on until the wee hours. They also knew she had plenty of money for a taxi.

They were both tired and a little tipsy after their own party, they told the police, so they went straight to bed. When they awoke the following morning and found that Kelly’s bed had still not been slept in, they became worried. She had never done anything like this before. First they telephoned the parents of the two girlfriends she had gone with, reliable in their estimation. Both Kelly’s friends, Alex Kirk and Jessica Bradley, had arrived home shortly after two in the morning. Then Adrian Matthews rang the police. PC Rearden, who took the call, picked up on the genuine concern in Mr Matthews’s voice and sent an officer around immediately.

Kelly’s parents said they last saw her around seven o’clock on the thirty-first of December, when she went to meet her friends. She was wearing blue jeans, white trainers, a thick cable-knit jumper and a three-quarter length suede jacket.

When questioned later, Kelly’s friends said that the group had become separated during the fireworks display, but nobody was too concerned. After all, there were thousands of people about, buses were running late and taxis were touting for business.

Adrian and Gillian Matthews weren’t rich, but they were comfortably off. Adrian oversaw the computer systems of a large retail operation and Gillian was assistant manager of a city centre building society. They owned a Georgian-style semi-detached house not far from Eccup Reservoir, in an area of the city closer to parks, golf courses and the countryside than to factories, warehouses and grim terraces of back-to-backs.

According to her friends and teachers, Kelly was a bright, personable, responsible girl, who got consistently high marks and was certain to land in the university of her choice, at the moment Cambridge, where she intended to read law. Kelly was also her school’s champion sprinter. She had beautiful gold-blonde hair, which she wore long, and she liked clothes, dancing, pop music and sports. She was also fond of classical music and quite an accomplished pianist.

It soon became clear to the investigating officer that Kelly Matthews was a most unlikely teenage runaway, and he instituted a search of the park. When, three days later, the search parties had found nothing, they called it off. In the meantime, police had also interviewed hundreds of revellers, some of whom said they thought they’d seen her with a man and others with a woman. Taxi drivers and bus drivers were also questioned, to no avail.

A week after Kelly disappeared, her shoulder-bag was found in some bushes near the park; in it were her keys, a diary, cosmetics, a hairbrush and a purse containing over thirty-five pounds and some loose change.

Her diary yielded no clues. The last entry, on the thirty-first of December, was a brief list of new year’s resolutions:

Banks stripped off his protective clothing, leaned against his car out in the street and lit a cigarette. It was going to be a hot, sunny day, he could tell, only the occasional high cloud scudding across the blue sky on a light breeze, and he would be spending most of it indoors, either at the scene or at Millgarth. He ignored the people on the other side of the road, who stopped to stare, and shut his ears to the honking horns from the snarl of cars up The Hill, which had now been blocked off completely by the local traffic police. The press had arrived; Banks could see them straining at the barriers.

Banks had known it would come to this eventually, or to something very much like this, from the very first moment he had agreed to head the North Yorkshire half of the two-county task force into the series of disappearances: five young women in all, three from West Yorkshire and two from North Yorkshire. The West Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) was in overall charge, but he was at county headquarters in Wakefield, so Banks and Blackstone rarely saw him. They reported directly to the head of CID, Area Commander Philip Hartnell, at Millgarth in Leeds, who was the official Senior Investigating Officer, but who left them to get on with the job. The main incident room was also at Millgarth.

Under Banks and Blackstone came several detective inspectors, a whole host of detective constables and sergeants, culled from both west and north county forces, skilled civilian employees, Crime Scene Co-ordinator DS Stefan Nowak and, acting as Consultant Psychologist, Dr Jenny Fuller, who had studied offender profiling in America with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, and didn’t look a bit like Jodie Foster. Jenny had also studied with Paul Britton in Leicester and was recognized as one of the rising stars in the relatively new field of psychology combined with police work.

Banks had worked with Jenny Fuller on his very first case in Eastvale, and they had become close friends. Almost more, but something always seemed to get in their way.

It was probably for the best, Banks told himself, though he often couldn’t convince himself of that when he looked at her. Jenny had such lips as you rarely saw on anyone but a pouting French sex symbol, her figure tapered and bulged in all the right places, and her clothes, usually expensive silky clothes, mostly in green and russet, just seemed to flow over her. It was that ‘liquefaction of her clothes’, that the poet Herrick wrote about, the dirty old devil. Banks had come across Herrick in a poetry anthology he was working his way through, having felt a disturbing ignorance in such matters for years.

Lines like Herrick’s stuck with him, as did the one about ‘sweet disorder in the dress’, which made him think of DS Annie Cabbot, for some reason. Annie wasn’t so obviously beautiful in the way Jenny was, not as voluptuous, not the kind to draw wolf whistles on the street, but she had a deep, quiet sort of beauty that appealed very much to Banks. Unfortunately, because of his new and onerous responsibilities, he hadn’t seen much of Annie lately and had found himself, because of the case, spending more and more time with Jenny, realizing that the old feelings, that odd and immediate spark between them, had never gone away. Nothing had
happened
as such, but it had been touch and go on occasion.

Annie was also consumed with her work. She had found a detective inspector’s position open in Western Division’s Complaints and Discipline Department, and had taken it because it was the first opportunity that came up. It wasn’t ideal, and it certainly didn’t win her any popularity contests, but it was a necessary step in the ladder she had set out to climb, and Banks had encouraged her to go for it.

DC Karen Hodgkins edged her little grey Nissan through the opening the police made in the barrier for her and broke off Banks’s chain of thought. She got out and walked over. Karen had proved an energetic and ambitious worker throughout the whole investigation, and Banks fancied she would go far if she developed a flair for police politics. She reminded him a bit of Susan Gay, his old DC, now a DS in Cirencester, but she had fewer sharp edges and seemed more sure of herself.

‘What’s the situation?’ Banks asked her.

‘Not much change, sir. Lucy Payne’s under sedation. The doctor says we won’t be able to talk to her until tomorrow.’

‘Have Lucy and her husband been fingerprinted?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What about her clothes?’ Banks had suggested that they take the clothes Lucy Payne had been wearing for forensic examination. After all, she wouldn’t be needing them in hospital.

‘They should be at the lab by now, sir.’