Aftermath (9 page)

They ordered pints of Tetley’s bitter and the last two portions of lamb stew and rice at the bar. It was warm enough to sit outside at one of the tables next to the cricket field. A local team was out practising, and the comforting sound of leather on willow punctuated their conversation.

Banks lit a cigarette and told Blackstone about AC Hartnell giving North Yorkshire the PC Taylor investigation, and his certainty that it would go to Annie.

‘She’ll love that,’ said Blackstone.

‘She’s already made her feelings quite clear.’

‘You’ve told her?’

‘I tried to put a positive spin on it to make her feel better, but . . . it sort of backfired.’

Blackstone smiled. ‘Are you two still an item?’

‘I think so, sort of, but half the time I’m not sure, to be honest. She’s very . . . elusive.’

‘Ah, the sweet mystery of woman.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Maybe you’re expecting too much of her?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes when a man loses his wife he starts looking for a new one in the first woman who shows any interest in him.’

‘Marriage is the last thing on my mind, Ken.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. I haven’t bloody time, for a start.’

‘Talking about marriage, how do you think the wife, Lucy Payne, fits in?’ Blackstone asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘She must have known. I mean she
was
living with the bloke.’

‘Maybe. But you saw the way things were set up back there. Payne could have sneaked anyone in through the garage and taken them straight into the cellar. If he kept the place locked and barred, nobody need have known. It was pretty well soundproofed.’

‘I’m sorry, but you can’t convince me that a woman lives with a killer who does what Payne did and she hasn’t a clue,’ said Blackstone. ‘What does he do? Get up after dinner and tell her he’s just off down to the basement to play with a teenage girl he’s abducted?’

‘He doesn’t have to tell her anything.’

‘But she
must
be involved. Even if she wasn’t his accomplice, she must at least have
suspected
something.’

Someone gave the cricket ball a hell of a whack and a cheer went up from the field.

Banks stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You’re probably right. Anyway, if there’s anything at all to connect Lucy Payne to what happened in the cellar, we’ll find out. For the moment, she’s not going anywhere. Unless we find out differently, we’d better remember that she’s a victim first and foremost.’

The SOCO teams might be spending weeks at the scene, Banks knew, and very soon number thirty-five The Hill would resemble a house undergoing major structural renovations. They would be taking in metal detectors, laser lights, infra-red, UV, high-powered vacuums and pneumatic drills; they would be collecting fingerprints, flaked skin, fibres, dried secretions, hairs, paint chips, Visa bills, letters, books and personal papers; they would strip the carpets and punch holes in the walls, break up the cellar and garage floors and dig up the gardens. And everything they gathered, perhaps more than a thousand exhibits, would have to be tagged, entered in HOLMES and stored in the evidence room at Millgarth.

Their meals arrived and they tucked right in, waving away the occasional fly. The stew was hearty and mildly spiced. After a few mouthfuls, Blackstone shook his head slowly. ‘Funny Payne’s got no form, don’t you think? Most of them have
something
odd in their background. Waving their willies at schoolkids, or a touch of sexual assault.’

‘More than his job’s worth. Maybe he’s just been lucky.’

Blackstone paused. ‘Or we’ve not been doing our jobs properly. Remember that series of rapes out Seacroft way two years or so back?’

‘The “Seacroft Rapist”? Yes, I remember reading about it.’

‘We never did catch him, you know.’

‘You think it might have been Payne?’

‘Possible, isn’t it? The rapes stopped, then girls started disappearing.’

‘DNA?’

‘Semen samples. The Seacroft Rapist was an excretor and he didn’t bother wearing a condom.’

‘Then check them against Payne’s. And check where he was living at the time.’

‘Oh, we will, we will. By the way,’ Blackstone went on, ‘one of the DCs who interviewed Maggie Forrest, the woman who phoned in the domestic, got the impression that she wasn’t telling him everything.’

‘Oh. What did he say?’

‘That she seemed deliberately vague, holding back. She admitted she knew the Paynes but said she knew nothing about them. Anyway, he didn’t think she was telling the complete truth as far as her relationship with Lucy Payne went. He thinks they’re a lot closer than she would admit.’

‘I’ll talk to her later,’ said Banks, glancing at his watch. He looked around at the blue sky, the white and pink blossoms drifting from the trees, the men in white on the cricket pitch. ‘Christ, Ken, I could sit here all afternoon,’ he said, ‘but I’d better get back to the house to check on developments.’

•

As she had feared, Maggie was unable to concentrate on her work for the rest of that day and alternated between watching the police activity out of her bedroom window and listening to the local radio for news reports. What came through was scant enough until the area commander in charge of the case gave a press conference, in which he confirmed that they had found the body of Kimberley Myers, and that it appeared she had been strangled. More than that, he wouldn’t say, except that the case was under investigation, forensic experts were on the scene and more details would be available shortly. He stressed that the investigation was not yet over and appealed for anyone who had seen Kimberley after eleven o’clock on Friday evening to come forward.

When the knock on her door and the familiar call, ‘It’s all right, it’s only me’, came after half past three, Maggie felt relieved. For some reason, she had been worried about Claire. She knew that she went to the same school as Kimberley Myers and that Terence Payne was a teacher there. She hadn’t seen Claire since Kimberley’s disappearance but imagined she must have been frantic with worry. The two were about the same age and surely must know one another.

Claire Toth often called on her way home from school, as she lived two doors down, both her parents worked, and her mother didn’t get home until about half past four. Maggie also suspected that Ruth and Charles had suggested Claire’s visits as a sneaky way of keeping an eye on her. Curious about the newcomer, Claire had first just dropped in to say hello. Then, intrigued by Maggie’s accent and her work, she had become a regular visitor. Maggie didn’t mind. Claire was a good kid, and a breath of fresh air, though she talked a mile a minute and Maggie often felt exhausted when she left.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt so awful,’ Claire said, dropping her backpack on the living-room floor and plonking herself down on the sofa, legs akimbo. This was odd, for a start, as she usually headed straight for the kitchen, to the milk and chocolate chip cookies Maggie fed her. She pulled back her long tresses and tucked them behind her ears. She was wearing her school uniform, green blazer and skirt, white blouse and grey socks, which had slipped down around her ankles. She had a couple of spots on her chin, Maggie noticed: bad diet or time of the month.

‘You know?’

‘It was all around school by lunchtime.’

‘Do you know Mr Payne?’

‘He’s my biology teacher. And he lives across the street from us. How
could
he? The pervert. When I think of what must have been going through his mind while he was teaching us about reproductive systems and dissecting frogs and all that stuff . . . ugh.’ She gave a shudder.

‘Claire, we don’t know that he did anything yet. All we know is that Mr and Mrs Payne had a fight and that he hit her.’

‘But they’ve found Kim’s body, haven’t they? And there wouldn’t be all those policemen over the road if all he’d done was hit his wife, would there?’

If all he’d done was hit his wife
. Maggie was often amazed at the casual acceptance of domestic violence, even by a girl-child such as Claire. True enough, she didn’t mean it the way it sounded and would be horrified if she knew the details of Maggie’s life back in Toronto, but still, the language came so easily.
Hit his wife
. Minor. Not important.

‘You’re quite right,’ she said. ‘It
is
more than that. But we don’t know that Mr Payne was responsible for what happened to Kimberley. Someone else might have done it.’

‘No. It’s him. He’s the one. He killed all those girls. He killed Kim.’

Claire started crying and Maggie felt awkward. She found a box of tissues and went to sit next to her on the sofa. Claire buried her head in Maggie’s shoulder and sobbed, her thin veneer of teenage cool stripped away in a second. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffling. ‘I don’t usually act like such a baby.’

‘What is it?’ Maggie asked, still stroking her hair. ‘What is it, Claire? You can tell me. You were her friend, weren’t you? Kim’s?’

Claire’s lip trembled. ‘I just feel so awful.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘But you don’t. You can’t! Don’t you see?’

‘See what?’

‘That it was my fault. It was my fault that Kim got killed. I should have been with her on Friday.
I should have been with her!
’ And when Claire buried her face in Maggie’s shoulder again, there came a loud knock at the door.

•

DI Annie Cabbot sat at her desk still cursing Banks under her breath and wishing she had never accepted the appointment to Complaints and Discipline, even though it had been the only divisional opening available for her at the level of inspector after passing her boards. Of course, she could have stayed in CID as a detective sergeant, or gone back to uniform for a while as an inspector in Traffic, but she had decided that C & D would be a worthwhile temporary step up until a suitable position became available in CID, which Banks had assured her wouldn’t be long. The Western Division was still undergoing some structural reorganization, part of which involved staffing levels, and for the moment CID was taking a back seat to more visible on-the-street and in-your-face policing. But their day would come. This way, at least, she would gain experience at the rank of inspector.

The one good thing about the new appointment was her office. Western Division had taken over the building adjoining the old Tudor-fronted headquarters, part of the same structure, knocked through the walls and redone the interior. While Annie didn’t have a large room to herself like Detective Superintendent Chambers, she did have a partitioned space in the general area, which gave her some degree of privacy and looked out over the market place, like Banks’s office.

Beyond her frosted-glass compartment sat the two detective sergeants and three constables who, along with Annie and Chambers, made up the entire Western Division Complaints and Discipline department. After all, police corruption was hardly a hot issue around Eastvale, and about the most serious case she had worked on so far was that of a beat policeman accepting free toasted teacakes from the Golden Grill. It turned out that he had been going out with one of the waitresses there and she was finding the way to his heart. Another waitress had become jealous and reported the matter to Complaints and Discipline.

It probably wasn’t fair to blame Banks, Annie thought, standing at the window and looking down on the busy square, and perhaps she was only doing so because of the vague dissatisfaction with their relationship that she was already feeling. She didn’t know what it was, or why, only that she was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with it. They hadn’t seen one another that often because of the Chameleon case, of course, and Banks had sometimes been so tired that he’d fallen asleep even before . . . but it wasn’t
that
that bothered her so much as the easy familiarity their relationship seemed to be attaining. When they were together, they were behaving more and more like an old married couple and Annie, for one, didn’t want that. Ironic as it seemed, the comfort and familiarity were making her feel distinctly
uncomfortable
. All they needed was the slippers and the fireplace. Come to think of it, in Banks’s cottage they even had those, too.

Annie’s phone rang. It was Detective Superintendent Chambers summoning her to his office next door. She knocked and went in when he said ‘Enter’, the way he liked it. Chambers sat behind his messy desk, a big man with the waistcoat buttons of his pinstripe suit stretched tight across his chest and belly. She didn’t know if his tie was covered with food stains or if it was supposed to look that way. He had the kind of face that seemed to be wearing a perpetual sneer, and small piggy eyes that Annie felt undress her as she walked in. His complexion resembled a slab of rare beef and his lips were fleshy, wet and red. Annie always half expected him to start drooling and slobbering as he spoke, but he hadn’t done it yet. Not one drop of saliva had found its way onto his green blotter. He had a Home Counties accent, which he seemed to think made him posh.

‘Ah, DI Cabbot. Please be seated.’

‘Sir.’

Annie sat as comfortably as she could, careful to make certain that her skirt didn’t ride too high over her thighs. If she’d known before she left for work that she was going to be summoned to see Chambers, she would have worn trousers.

‘I’ve just been handed a most interesting assignment,’ Chambers went on. ‘Most interesting indeed. One that I think will be right up your alley, as they say.’

Annie had the advantage over him but didn’t want to let it show. ‘Assignment, sir?’

‘Yes. It’s about time you started pulling your weight around here, DI Cabbot. How long have you been with us now?’

‘Two months.’

‘And in that time you’ve accomplished . . .?’

‘The case of Constable Chaplin and the toasted teacakes, sir. Scandal narrowly averted. A satisfactory resolution all around, if I might say so. . .’

Chambers reddened. ‘Yes, well, this one might just take the edge off your attitude, Inspector.’

‘Sir?’ Annie raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t stop herself baiting Chambers. He had the kind of arrogant, self-important bearing that cried out for pricking. She knew it could be bad for her career, but even with the rekindling of her ambition, Annie had sworn to herself that her career wasn’t worth anything if it cost her her soul. Besides, she had an odd sort of faith that good coppers like Banks, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe and ACC McLaughlin might have more say in her future than pillocks like Chambers who, everyone knew, was a lazy slob just waiting for retirement. Still, she hadn’t been a lot more careful with Banks at first, either, and it was only her good fortune that he had been charmed and seduced by her insubordination rather than angered by it. Gristhorpe, poor man, was a saint, and she hardly ever saw Red Ron McLaughlin, so she didn’t get a chance to piss him off.