Blood at the Root (24 page)

Susan put her hands behind her head, rested back on the pillow and sighed.

“Was that a sigh of contentment,” Gavin asked, “or disappointment?”

She laughed and nudged him gently. “You should know. You had something to do with it.”

“
I
did? Little old me?”

And to think that not more than an hour ago she’d had cold feet. When they had got back to her flat, she had asked Gavin in and one thing led to another, as she had known and hoped it would when she agreed to the second bottle of wine. But when the crucial decision came out into the open, there was an embarrassing moment when it turned out that neither of them had any protection. Well, it was good in a way, Susan realized. It meant that he wouldn’t think she was a slut, and she didn’t think he had taken her out to dinner in the expectation of ending up in her bed. But it was bloody awkward, nonetheless.

Luckily, there was an all-night chemist’s on York Road, not more than a couple of hundred yards away, and Gavin threw on his jacket and set off. While he was gone, Susan started to get nervous and have second thoughts. Instead of giving in to them, she busied herself tidying up the place, especially the bedroom, throwing clean sheets on the bed, and when he came back she found, after a little kissing and caressing, that her resolve was just as strong as before.

And now, as she basked in the afterglow, she was glad she had made the decision. One of Chopin’s piano concertos – she didn’t know which one – played softly from the living room.

“Well, I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate,” said Gavin. His hand brushed Susan’s thigh and started sliding up over her stomach.

“Mmm. Me neither.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll bet we’re having a better victory celebration than anyone. Even golden boy, wherever he is.”

Something about the mention of Banks’s name gave Susan a moment of uneasiness, the way she had felt naked talking on the telephone to Banks when the Jason Fox case started. But it passed. She smiled and stretched, feeling a little sleepy from the wine and sex. “Oh, he’s probably not having such a bad time,” she said. “He does all right.”

“What makes you think that? You don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”

“I do know where he is.”

Gavin’s hand rested on her breast. He had soft hands, like silk brushing her warm skin. She felt her nipple harden. “You know?” His hand moved again, downward.

Susan gave a little gasp. “Yes. Amsterdam. He’s gone to Amsterdam.”

“Lucky devil,” said Gavin. Then he did something with his hand that made Susan realize she wasn’t all that sleepy after all.

Finding Jimmy Riddle wearing out the carpet back at Eastvale Divisional HQ had about the same effect on Banks’s stomach as the dodgy landing.

The plane had banked sharply and plunged into thick cloud. By the time Banks had seen the runway, they were practically on it, still at an awkward angle, and for one stomach-lurching moment he had been certain the pilot was coming in too steeply and would crash the plane, wing first. But it leveled out in time, and apart from a little more bouncing and swaying than usual, the landing had gone without incident.

And now, an hour and a half later, his stomach was going through the same cartwheels again.

It was late afternoon. Banks’s flight had been delayed and he hadn’t arrived at Leeds and Bradford until three o’clock; he hadn’t even eaten lunch. Not much chance of a bite now. He hadn’t intended calling at the station, but when he neared Eastvale, he couldn’t face going back to the empty house immediately.

“Ah, Chief Inspector Banks,” said Riddle. “I’ve been waiting for you. Nice of you to drop by.”

“Sorry, sir,” Banks mumbled, as Riddle followed him into his office.

Riddle tugged his trousers up at the knees to preserve the creases and sat on the edge of the desk, looking down on Banks. Banks supposed he took that position because he thought it gave him a psychological edge. Little did he know.

“And take the bloody smirk off your face, man,” Riddle said. “Have you any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

“Trouble, sir?”

“Yes, Banks. Serious trouble this time. You bugger off for a weekend in Amsterdam in the middle of a major investigation and leave your underlings to do your work for you. And it so happens that while you’re away, they solve the case.” He smiled. “I must admit, that does give me more than a little satisfaction.”

“With due respect, sir-”

“With due
nothing
, Banks.” Riddle craned his neck forward. The tendons tautened and the skin around his throat flushed. “What the bloody hell did you think you were up to? Can you answer me that?”

Banks had tried to prepare himself for a moment like this on the flight back. If truth be told, though, he had expected it to come from Gristhorpe, not Riddle. And there was a big difference. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Riddle. The man was squeaky-clean. It wasn’t even that he suspected Riddle of “fraternizing with fascists.” That had only been a joke. A bad one, at that. But whereas Gristhorpe would accept Banks’s explanation at face value and let things lie, Riddle was too much of an interfering bastard to do that.

If Banks told him what he had discovered from Craig McKeracher, Riddle would be on the phone to his cronies all over the place in a matter of moments. If there was any chance of glory to result from the situation, he would want his due share. And one wrong telephone call could have serious consequences for Craig. On the other hand, if Riddle could see nothing to be gained, then he would order Banks to pass on what he knew and leave it to West Yorkshire. Riddle hadn’t got to be chief constable by pursuing the truth against all odds. The problem was, someone in West Yorkshire had already been leaking information to Motcombe.

A dilemma, then.

Banks also knew that, as far as Riddle was concerned, the case was solved. Most satisfactorily solved.

So it was with carefully measured tones that he answered the question, aware even as he did so that it just wouldn’t wash. “I can’t tell you everything, sir,” he said. “At least, not just yet. It’s very delicate. But I can assure you my trip was directly related to the Jason Fox case.”

Riddle shook his head. “Delicate? Too delicate for the likes of me? No, Banks. That won’t do. I’ve already told you, the Jason Fox case was solved in your absence.”

“I know, sir. I read about it in the morning paper.” Banks had picked up a copy of
The Independent
at Schiphol Airport and had seen a full report on the arrest and confession of Mark Wood for the murder of Jason Fox. Including a quote from Riddle to the effect that “Fox was killed by a friend of his in a dispute after several drinks. While alcohol was certainly a factor, race was not, I am very pleased to say.” Banks didn’t believe it for a moment. “But I’m not sure that’s how it happened,” he went on.

“Oh,” said Riddle. “You’re not sure that’s how it happened, aren’t you? Maybe if you’d been here doing your job, you’d have a better idea about what’s going on. Well, let me tell you, Banks, that is
exactly
how it happened. Your fellow officers got a confession out of Mark Wood. While you were off cruising the red-light district, no doubt.”

Banks had to admit that did hit a little too close to home. “In all fairness, sir-”

Riddle stood up and went to lean on the filing cabinet, checking for dust first. “Don’t talk to me about fairness, Banks. I’ve been as fair with you as I can be. I’ve given you more latitude, more freedom to tilt at your own various windmills than I’ve allowed any man under my direct command. And what have you done with that freedom? You’ve abused it, that’s what you’ve done. Day trips to Leeds to buy classical records and meet your bit on the side, and now a weekend in Amsterdam in the middle of a major investigation. What do you have to say?”

“If you’ll allow me to get a word in, sir,” Banks said calmly. “In the first place, my trip was
entirely
case-related, and in the second case, you haven’t
solved
the Jason Fox case.”

Riddle’s pate went on red alert. “And I’m telling you the case is solved.
Telling
you, Banks.”

“But-”

“And who paid for this trip to Amsterdam, might I ask?”

Shit. If Banks told him it was the Met, Riddle either wouldn’t believe him, or he’d be on the phone trying to find out exactly who was behind it, setting off alarms like a mad cow walking through a Cambodian minefield. Besides, Dirty Dick Burgess, the only one who could really vouch for him apart from Craig, was on holiday “somewhere tropical.”

“I can’t say, sir,” he said.

“I trust you didn’t pay for it yourself, then, out of your own pocket?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought not. And your wife? Did she accompany you on this mysterious case-related mission?”

“No, sir.”

“Your mistress, perhaps? Or were you out there shagging the local girls?”

Banks stood up, his irritation growing. “Look, sir, I’m beginning to resent these implications. You might be my senior officer, but I don’t have to put up with personal abuse from you.”

Riddle stepped forward, chin jutting out like the prow of a ship. “You’ll put up with whatever I dish out, laddie, and right now I’m dishing out a suspension.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me, Banks. I’m suspending you from your duties pending a disciplinary hearing into your activities.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Yes, I bloody well can. Read the regulations. I think skiving off for a long weekend during an important investigation is grounds enough for an inquiry. Dereliction of duty. For crying out loud, man, you’re a DCI. You’re supposed to set an example.”

Banks sat down again, a leaden weight in his chest. “I see. This is official, then?”

“Official as it gets.”

Banks could hardly believe what he was hearing. Anger burned inside him. Red behind his eyes. Everything was fucked. His marriage. Now his job. For some reason, this idiot had decided to persecute him. It just didn’t matter to Riddle that there might still be unanswered questions in the Jason Fox case; he’d put his blinkers on and he wouldn’t take them off. No doubt pleasing the Muslim community
and
the general populace simultaneously.

“So that’s it, then?” he said. “I’m free to go?”

“Yes. In fact, I order you to go.” Riddle grinned. “You’re suspended, Banks.”

“Right. I can tell you’ve been looking forward to saying those words for some time.”

Riddle nodded. “Oh, yes.”

Banks got up, slipped his cigarettes in his top pocket and picked his jacket up from the coatrack. Next he picked up his briefcase but paused in front of Riddle and laid it down on the desk again on his way to the door. “Is that your last word on the subject, sir?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Banks nodded. Then he swung his arm back as far as it would go and hit Riddle hard, right in the mouth. Riddle staggered back against the flimsy desk and slid to the floor. Which was where he lay, shaking his head and wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand as Banks said, “And I’ve been looking forward to that, too, sir. Goodbye.” Then he left the station, his knuckles aching and bleeding.

The minute Susan heard raised voices arguing about Amsterdam, she tiptoed into the corridor like a sneaky school-girl to listen. Then she heard a loud crash and saw Banks stalk out of his office and out of the building through the fire exit, without even glancing in her direction.

The chief constable hadn’t left, though. Puzzled, Susan crossed the corridor and pushed Banks’s office door open. Then she just stood there. Chief Constable Riddle was getting up from the floor, brushing dust from his uniform and dabbing his mouth with a blood-soaked handkerchief.

He saw her standing in the doorway, pointed and said, “Get back to your office, DC Gay. Nothing happened, you saw nothing, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir… Er… what about DCI Banks…?”

“DCI Banks is under suspension.”

Susan’s jaw dropped.

“Back to your office,” Riddle said again. She noticed one of his front teeth was chipped. “And remember: If word of this gets out, I’ll know exactly where it came from, and your career won’t be worth two penn’orth of shit, sergeant’s exam or no sergeant’s exam.”

“Yes, sir.”

Back in her office, Susan leaned on her desk, took a deep breath and tried to collect the thoughts that were suddenly spinning in her mind, out of control. Had she really just seen Jimmy Riddle getting up off the floor in Banks’s office, wiping blood from his mouth? Yes, she had. Was that why Banks had got suspended?

But Riddle wanted her to keep it quiet, so there had to be another reason. He could have Banks kicked off the force for assaulting a senior officer, but it would have to be made public then.

She could understand Riddle’s desire for silence easily enough – he would look like a real wimp if he publicly accused one of his DCIs of assault. After all, as Susan well knew, the police force was still very much a man’s world, and physical prowess was important to men. Riddle would feel humiliated by what had just happened; it would be a blow to his macho ego. The last thing he’d want known was that Banks, four or five inches shorter than him and slighter in build, had knocked him down. If that got out, people all over the region would be sniggering at him behind his back even more than they did now.

So he must have suspended Banks for some other reason.

Amsterdam? Was that it?

And then she realized something. At first, it was just a vague sense of apprehension, then the tumblers fell into position, one inexorably after the other. Then came the final click, and the door opened.

Susan looked at her watch. Just after five.

First, she drove the short distance to Banks’s house. As she drove, she chewed on her lip wondering if she was doing the right thing. She wished Superintendent Gristhorpe were here to advise her, but he’d gone off to teach a two-week course at Bramshill that morning. She didn’t even know what she was going to say to Banks. After all, he was her senior officer. What could she, a mere DC, do to help?

But there were things she wanted to know. She had worked with Banks for several years now and had come to know his moods pretty well. She had seen him angry, sad, hurt and frustrated, but she had never seen him like this. Nor would she ever have thought him the kind of person to do something as stupid and impulsive as punching Jimmy Riddle.

Call it woman’s intuition, a term she had a lot more respect for than she would ever care to admit in front of a roomful of male colleagues, but she felt something was seriously wrong. And it wasn’t only to do with Riddle. All she could think of was that something had happened in Amsterdam. But what?

She walked up the front path to Banks’s semi. Standing on the doorstep, she took a deep breath, counted to three, and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

She rang again.

Still nothing.

She waited a few minutes more, tried knocking and ringing the bell. Still nothing. Where the hell was he? Looking around, she couldn’t see his car.

She dashed down the path and jumped back in her Golf. She was starting to feel angry now, not a good emotional state for driving, but at least anger would sustain her all the way and help her do what she had to. She headed out of town through the darkening countryside at a dangerous speed, crossed over the A1 and headed southeast, then hurtled through the dark, through villages where families were just settling down to tea and an evening with the telly.

Soon she was on the outskirts of Northallerton, pulling up outside Gavin’s modest terrace house.

Gavin answered on the first ring and smiled when he saw Susan. “Come in,” he said, standing aside. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

Susan walked into the hall and Gavin leaned forward to plant a kiss on her cheek. She jerked back and slapped him hard across the face. Gavin staggered back a step or two. “You bastard,” Susan said. “You bastard. How could you do it?”

Gavin looked surprised. He held his hand to the reddening weal on his cheek. “Do what? What the hell did you do that for?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t. Look, take your coat off and come through. Then you can tell me what you’re on about.”

Susan followed him into the living room but she didn’t take her coat off. “I won’t be stopping,” she said. “I’ll just say what I have to say and go.”

Gavin nodded. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded. He was wearing tartan slippers, Susan noticed, and looked ridiculous. Somehow, that helped.

“All right,” he said. “I’m listening. And it’d better be good after what you just did to me.”

“Oh, it’s good all right,” Susan said. “It took me a while. I don’t know. Maybe I’m thick, maybe I’m a fool, but I worked it out in the end.”

“Well, you are supposed to be a detective, after all. But look, I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you back up a little and explain?”

Susan shook her head. “You’re so damn smooth, aren’t you, Gavin? You used me. That’s what I mean.”

“How did I use you? I thought you enjoyed-”

“I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about information. All the time we were going out together, all the things I told you in private, all the station gossip. You passed it all on to Jimmy Riddle, didn’t you? Even what I told you in bed on Saturday.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But he looked away from her eyes, down at his slippers. Susan had seen that guilty gesture in enough criminals to know it meant Gavin was lying. “Yes, you bloody well do,” she went on. “How else could Riddle have known everything he did? I should have twigged much earlier, then maybe none of this would have happened.”

“What?”

“Riddle suspended Banks this afternoon. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

Gavin shrugged. “Oh, that. Well, it’s the chief constable’s pre-”

“Don’t give me that crap. You got me to talk about Banks in private. Shop talk. It was me who told you he liked to call at the Classical Record Shop whenever he had to go to Leeds. When Riddle mentioned that to me a few days ago, I didn’t even think at the time about where he might have got it from. It was me who told you about Pamela Jeffreys, too, the violist involved in that case a couple of years ago, the one he felt guilty about. And on Saturday night, in bed, I told you Banks was in Amsterdam. My fault for being such a fool. Blame it on the wine. But you… you… You’re beneath contempt.”

“Okay,” said Gavin, gazing at her coolly. “So the chief constable wanted to be informed about what was going on at Eastvale. So what? He’s like that. Unlike his predecessor, he likes to be in the know. Hands on. It’s easy for you.
You
don’t have to work close to him, day in, day out, do you?” He pointed his thumb at his chest. “I do. And we all have our careers to consider, don’t we? What’s so wrong with that?”

Susan could hardly believe what she was hearing, even though it was exactly what she had expected. “So you admit it? Just like that? You used me to spy on my colleagues?”

“Well, seeing as you have the evidence, there’s not a lot else I can say, is there? I can hardly deny it. Yes.
Mea culpa
.”

“I don’t understand, Gavin. How could you do that?”

Gavin shrugged. “I never thought it would come to anything like this,” he said. “For crying out loud, it was only little tidbits, nothing important. Like I said, Riddle just wanted to be kept informed. But that wasn’t why I asked you out in the first place. That only came later. When he found out I was going out with you. And believe me, I didn’t tell him. He’s got quite a network, has Riddle.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really think it would do any harm.”

“Did he want to be kept informed about Eastvale in general, or DCI Banks in particular?”

Gavin shifted from foot to foot. “Well, he
did
ask about Banks in particular. He never really approved of Banks, you know. Thought he was a bit of a maverick, if truth be told.”

“I know that,” said Susan. “He never liked him. Right from the start. I remember the Deborah Harrison case, when Banks upset some of Riddle’s important friends. He was just looking for something to use against him. And you used me to get it for him. That’s what I can’t forgive.”

“Like I said, I didn’t really think I was doing anything-”

“Oh, stuff it, Gavin. I’m not interested in your excuses. You used me to scupper Banks’s career, and that’s all I care about.”

“If that’s how you want to see it.”

“Is there any other way?”

“I take it things are over between us, then?”

Susan could only look at him and shake her head. Then she turned to leave.

“What is it, Susan?” Gavin called after her. “Fancy him yourself, do you? You should listen to the way you talk about him. Like a lovesick teenager. Believe me, it wasn’t very difficult to get you talking about him. The hardest thing was getting you to stop. Even in bed.”

Susan slammed the door behind her and got back in her car. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even turn the key in the ignition. All she could do was sit there, hands gripping the steering wheel, shaking. She took deep breaths.

And then Susan did something she hardly ever did, something she always hated herself for when it happened. She started to cry. Bloody great convulsive sobs. Because, fuck it, she said to herself, Gavin was right. She had never admitted it, but she had known it for ages. It
was
Banks she cared about; it
was
Banks she fancied. And, dammit, he was a married man, he was her senior officer, and he wouldn’t look at her that way in a month of Sundays. She was just another stupid girl in love with her boss and there was no way she could stay in Eastvale now, not after this.