Innocent Graves (11 page)

“Uncool?”

“You know teenagers, Chief Inspector. We’re ancient and decrepit creatures to them.”

“I suppose we are.” Banks took a deep breath and turned back to Sir Geoffrey. “This is a little delicate, I’m afraid, but I have to ask where you went after the Royal Hotel reception ended at four o’clock yesterday.”

“Good God, man! You can’t poss—”

“Geoff, he has to ask. He’s just doing his job,” said Michael Clayton, putting his hand on Sir Geoffrey’s arm. “Offensive though it may be.”

Sir Geoffrey ran his hand over his hair. “I suppose so. I had a private meeting with a client, if you must know. A man from the government called Oliver Jackson. It’s a very confidential matter, and I don’t want
anyone
else to know about the meeting. Things like this can have an effect on share prices and any number of market factors. Not to mention international affairs. Do you understand?”

Banks nodded. “There is just one more thing …”

Sir Geoffrey sighed. “Go ahead, if you must.”

“I was wondering about any boyfriends Deborah might have had.”

“Boyfriends?”

“Yes. It would be perfectly natural for a girl of sixteen to have an interest in the opposite sex. Perfectly innocent things, like going to the pictures with a boy, maybe. She did have a ticket stub from the Regal in her blazer pocket.”

Sir Geoffrey shook his head. “She used to go to the pictures with her mother a lot. The two of them … Deborah didn’t have any boyfriends, Chief Inspector. You’re barking up quite the wrong tree there. She didn’t have time for boys.”

“Had she never had a boyfriend?”

“Only Pierre, if that counts at all.”

“Pierre?”

“In Bordeaux, or rather at Montclair. My wife’s family owns a chateau in the country near Bordeaux. We often spend holidays there. Pierre is a neighbour’s son. All quite innocent, of course.”

“Of course,” Banks agreed. “And a long way away.”

“Yes … well. Look, about this Jela
č
i
ć
character. That’s a disturbing piece of news. Are you going to bring him in?”

“We’re pursuing enquiries in a number of directions,” Banks said as he and Susan walked to the door, annoyed at himself for sounding as if he were talking to the press.

Outside, they ducked through the reporters beyond the gate and got back into Banks’s car out of the rain.

“Interesting, don’t you think?” Banks said. “About the boyfriend.”

“Yes, sir. Either he really didn’t know, or he was lying.”

“But why lie?”

“Perhaps Deborah really did keep it a secret from him? If he’s a strict father, I could see her doing that.”

“Possibly. What about his alibi?”

“Very plausible,” said Susan. “I noticed you didn’t ask his wife for hers.”

“One at a time, Susan. One a time. Besides, I hardly think Sylvie Harrison murdered her own daughter. She’s not tall or strong enough, for a start.”

“If she goes to a health club, she’s probably strong enough,” Susan pointed out. “Maybe she stood on a stone?”
Banks sneezed into his handkerchief.

“Bless you, sir,” Susan said.

They headed towards North Market Street. “You know,” said Banks, “I think there’s a lot more to Deborah’s life than people know, or are saying. I’d like to have another talk with her mother, alone if possible. Michael Clayton was right, teenagers don’t have a lot of time for adults, but daughters do sometimes confide in their mothers. And I’d like to find this John, if he exists.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does, sir. Deborah was an attractive girl. And she was sixteen. I’d be very surprised indeed if she had nothing at all to do with boys.”

Banks’s car phone beeped. He picked it up.

“DI Stott here.”

“What’s up, Barry?”

“I think we should meet up back at the station. We’ve got a description of a possible suspect in the Deborah Harrison murder, and it could be Jela
č
i
ć
. Vic Manson called, too. Jela
č
i
ć
’
s prints are all over the vodka bottles.”

“We’re on our way.” Banks switched off the phone and put his foot down.

IV

All the way home on the rickety bus, Rebecca chewed her nails. She didn’t look once at the fading autumn scenery beyond the rain-streaked windows: the muted gold, russet and lemon leaves still clinging to the roadside trees, fragile and insubstantial as the moon’s halo; the soft greens and browns of the fields; the runic patterns of the drystone walls. She didn’t notice the way that the dale to her west, with its gradually steepening valley sides, was partially lost in mist and drizzle, making it look just like a Chinese water-colour.

Rebecca just chewed her nails and wished that tight, tearing, churning feeling inside her would go away. She felt constantly on the verge of screaming, and she knew if she started she could never stop. She took deep breaths and held them to calm herself. They helped.

By the time the bus lumbered into Eastvale, she had regained some control of her emotions, but she still felt devastated, as if her world had been suddenly blown apart. She supposed it had to happen, that she had been living a lie, living on borrowed time, or whatever other cliché she could come up with to describe the last few months of her life.

Looking at it now, her life had simply become one hangover after another; either from booze or infidelity, it didn’t seem to make any difference. What pleasures she had found in getting drunk or having sex were so fleeting and so quickly overwhelmed by the pains—headaches, stomach-ache, guilt, shame—that they no longer seemed worthwhile. But was it too late now? Had she lost Daniel?

Almost there.

She pushed the bell and felt the driver and other passengers giving her strange looks as she waited for the bus to stop. What could they sense about her? Could they smell sex on her? She hadn’t washed before leaving Patrick in Richmond; she had simply pulled her clothes on as quickly as possible and left. But her raincoat covered the torn blouse. God, what could she do about that? If Daniel were home, he would notice. But what did it matter now? He knew anyway. Even so, she couldn’t stand the thought of his knowing she had been with Patrick this afternoon.

As the bus approached the stop, she saw the knot of reporters hanging about by the church walls and knew why the passengers were looking at her. She was getting off at St Mary’s, the scene of the most horrible crime Eastvale had experienced in decades.

The bus came to a sharp halt and Rebecca would have tumbled forwards if she hadn’t been holding onto the metal pole. When the doors opened, she jumped off and dashed past the policeman at the gate, then ran through the churchyard to the vicarage.

When she got there she flung open the door and called out for Daniel. Silence. Thank God, he wasn’t home. Pulling off her torn blouse, she ran upstairs to the bathroom to wash the smell of sex from her body. Then she would be ready to face Daniel. She would have to be.

V

Ive Jela
č
i
ć
lived on the sixth floor of a ten-storey block of flats in Burmantofts, off York Road. In the grey November drizzle, the maze of tall buildings reminded Banks of a newspaper picture he’d seen of workers’ quarters in some Siberian city.

“Charming, isn’t it?” said Detective Inspector Ken Blackstone, waiting for them outside. He looked at his watch. “Do you know, the council had to put slippery domes on all the roofs to stop kids climbing down on the upper balconies and breaking in through people’s windows?”

Immaculately dressed as usual, Blackstone made Banks aware that his top collar button was undone and his tie a little askew. Blackstone looked like an academic, with his wire-rimmed glasses, bookworm’s complexion and thinning sandy hair, a little curly around the ears, and he was, in fact, something of an expert on art and art fraud. Not that there was often much call for his area of expertise in Leeds. Nobody had knocked off any Atkinson Grimshaws recently, and only an idiot would try to fake a Henry Moore sculpture.

“Jela
č
i
ć
’
s alibi checks out,” Blackstone said as they walked towards the entrance. “For what it’s worth. And we’ve had a poke about his flat. Nothing.”

“What do
you
think it’s worth?” Banks asked.

Blackstone pursed his cupid’s-bow lips. “Me? About as much as a fart in a bathtub. There were three of them—all Croatian. Stipe Pavi
č
, Mile Paveli
č
 and Vjeko Batorac. They’d probably swear night was day to protect one another from the police. Here it is. Take my word, the lift doesn’t work.”

Banks looked through the open sliding doors. The walls of the lift were covered in bright, spray-painted graffiti, and even from where he stood he could smell glue and urine. They took the stairs instead, surprising a couple of kids sniffing solvent on the third-floor stairwell. The kids ran. They knew the only people dressed like Blackstone in that neighbourhood were likely to be coppers.

There were a few times when Banks regretted smoking, and the climb to the sixth-floor flat was one of them. Puffing for breath and
sweating a little, he finally arrived at the outside walkway that went past the front doors.

Number 604 had once been red, but most of the paint had peeled off. It also looked as if it had been used for knife-throwing practice. Jela
č
i
ć
answered on the first knock, wearing jeans and a string vest. His upper body looked strong and muscular, and tufts of thick black hair spilled through the holes in the vest. With his height, longish hair and hooked nose, he certainly resembled the descriptions of the man seen in St Mary’s yesterday evening.

“Why you bother me?” he said, standing aside to let them in and letting his eyes rest on Susan for longer than necessary. “I tell you already, I have done nothing.”

Inside, the flat was small enough to feel crowded with four people in it and tidy enough to surprise Banks. If nothing else, Ive Jela
č
i
ć
was a good housekeeper. An ironing board stood in one corner, with a shirt spread over it, and there was a small television set in the opposite corner. No video or stereo equipment in sight. The only other furniture in the room consisted of a battered sofa and a table with three chairs. Family photographs and a couple of religious icons stood on the mantelpiece over the electric fire.

“How are you making a living now, Mr Jela
č
i
ć
?” Banks asked. “Dole.”

“Do you own a car?”

“Why?”

“Just answer the question.”

“
Da
. Is old Ford Fiesta.”

“Did you drive it to Eastvale yesterday?”

Jela
č
i
ć
looked at Blackstone. “
Ne
. I tell him already. I play cards. Vjeko tells you. And Stipe and Mile.”

Jela
č
i
ć
sat down on his sofa, taking up most of it, and lit a cigarette. The room quickly began to fill with smoke. Blackstone stood with his back against the door, and Banks and Susan sat on the wooden chairs. Banks soon noticed the way Jela
č
i
ć
was sliding his eyes over Susan’s body, and he could tell Susan noticed it too, the way she made sure her skirt was pulled down as far over her knees
as it would go and the way she kept her knees pressed tight together. But still Jela
č
i
ć
ogled.

“The thing is,” Banks said, “that people will often lie to cover for their friends, if they think a friend is in trouble.”

Jela
č
i
ć
leaned forward aggressively, muscles bulging in his arms and shoulders. “You call my friends liars!
Jebem ti mater!
You tell that to their face. Fascist police.

Š
upak
.”

Banks held out a photograph of Deborah Harrison. “Did you know this girl?”

Jela
č
i
ć
glared at Banks for a moment before glancing towards the photo. He shook his head.

“Are you sure.”

“Da.”

“She went to St Mary’s, sang in the church choir, used to walk through the graveyard on her way home.”

He shook his head again.

“I think you’re lying, Mr Jela
č
i
ć
. You see, she complained about you. She said you used to make lewd, sexual comments and gestures towards her. What do you think about that?”

“Is not true.”

“Father Charters said you were drunk most of the time, you didn’t do your job properly and you bothered the girls. Is that true?”

“
Ne
. He is liar. All St Mary’s people lie, get Ive in trouble, make him lose job.”

“Did you ever enter the Inchcliffe Mausoleum?”

“
Nikada
. Is always locked.”

Banks looked at Ken Blackstone and rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Ive. We found your fingerprints all over the empty vodka bottles in there.”

“Vrag ti nosi!”

“We know you went down there. Why?” Jela
č
i
ć
paused to sulk for a moment, then said, “All right. So I go down there sometime in summer when it get too hot. Just for cool, you understand? Maybe I have a little drink and smoke. Is not crime.”

“Did you ever take anyone else down there? Any girls?”

“Nikada.”

Banks waved the photograph. “And you swear you didn’t know this girl?”

Jela
č
i
ć
leaned back on the sofa. “Maybe I just see her, you know, if I am working and she walk past.”

“So you do admit you might have seen her?”

“
Da.
But that is all.”

“Mr Jela
č
i
ć
, what were you wearing last night?”