Strange Affair (11 page)

“It’s all right,” said Annie. “Is that what you always called her? Jenn, not Jenny?”

Kate sniffled and blew her nose. “Yes. It’s what she liked to be called. She hated Jenny. She just wasn’t a Jenny. Like I’m not a Katy or a Kathy, I suppose.”

And like I’m not Anne, thought Annie. Funny the way names, contractions especially, tended to stick. She had been Annie all the time growing up in the artists’ colony, and only at school had people called her Anne. “The two of you must have talked,” Annie said. “What sort of things did she talk about?”

“The usual things.”

Christ, thought Annie, this was like trying to get water out of a stone. “Did you notice any change in her mood or behaviour recently?” she asked.

“Yes. She seemed very nervous and jumpy lately. It wasn’t like her.”

“Nervous? Since when?”

“Just these past few days.”

“Did she tell you what it was about?”

“No. She was even more quiet than usual.”

“Do you think there’s any connection between that and her reaction to last night’s phone call, the late drive?”

“I don’t know,” said Kate. “There might have been.”

The problem was, Annie realized, that Jennifer’s mobile
had been taken along with everything else. Still, the phone company records might help.

“Do you know which network she used?”

“Orange.”

Annie made a note to follow up, then asked, “Do you have anything with her handwriting on it?”

“What?”

“A note or something? Letter? Postcard?”

Kate turned to a corkboard on the wall by the door. A number of Far Side cartoons were pinned there, along with a few postcards. Kate went over and unpinned one of them, a view of the Eiffel Tower, and carried it over to Annie. “Jenn went to Paris for a weekend break in March,” Kate said. “She sent me this. We had a good laugh because she got back here before it did.”

“Did she go by herself?” Annie asked, taking a photocopy of the note found in Jennifer Clewes’s back pocket from her briefcase to compare the handwriting.

“Yes. She said she’d always wanted to go on the Eurostar and they had a special deal. She went around all the art galleries. She loved going to galleries and museums.”

To Annie’s untrained eye, the handwriting looked the same, but she would have to get an expert to examine it. “Can I keep this?” she asked.

“I suppose so.”

Annie put the photocopy and the postcard in her briefcase. “You said she went alone,” Annie went on, “but isn’t Paris supposed to be the city of romance?”

“Jenn wasn’t going out with anyone back then.”

“But she has been more recently?”

“I think so.”

“Just think so?”

“Well, Jenn could be very private. I mean, she didn’t kiss and tell, that sort of thing. But she’d been getting a lot of calls on her mobile lately, and making a lot. And she’d stayed out all night on a couple of occasions. She didn’t usually do that.”

“Since when?”

“A few weeks.”

“But this started before the odd behaviour?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you his name? I assume it was a he?”

“Good Lord, yes, of course. But she didn’t mention any names. She didn’t even tell me that she
was
seeing someone. It was just a feeling I got from her behaviour. Intuition. I put two and two together.”

“But you said she seemed nervous and jumpy. That’s hardly the way a new relationship is supposed to make you feel, is it? And why was she so secretive? Didn’t you ever talk about personal matters, say if one of you split up with a boyfriend or something?”

“We’ve only been sharing six months,” said Kate. “And nothing like that’s happened to either of us in that time. There’s that one bloke keeps pestering her, but that’s all.”

“Who?”

“Her ex-boyfriend. His name’s Victor, but that’s all I know about him. He keeps ringing and hanging around. You don’t think…?”

“I don’t think anything yet,” said Annie. “Are you sure you don’t know his second name, where he lives?”

“Sorry,” said Kate. “It was over before we started sharing. Or Jenn
thought
it was.”

“What did she think about it? Was she frightened of him?”

“No. Just annoyed, that’s all.”

“How did you two come to be sharing?”

Kate looked away. “I’d rather not say. It’s private.”

Annie leaned forward. “Look, Kate,” she said, “this is a murder investigation. Nothing’s private. What was it? An advertisement in the papers? The Internet? What?”

Kate remained silent and Annie became aware of the tap dripping in the sink. She heard water spraying from a hose in a garden beyond the open window, and a child squealed with delight.

“Kate?”

“Oh, all right, all right. I thought I was pregnant. I did one of those home tests, you know, but I didn’t trust it.”

“How does Jennifer come into this?”

“It was where she worked. She was an administrator at a private women’s health centre. They specialize in family planning.”

“Like the British Pregnancy Advisory Service? Marie Stopes?” Annie remembered both of these from her own unexpected brush with pregnancy nearly three years ago, though in the end she had gone National Health Service.

“It’s a new chain. There are only a few of them open yet, as far as I know.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Berger-Lennox Centre.”

“And they perform abortions?”

“Not at the centre itself, no, but they have satellite clinics, and they arrange for abortions to be performed. That’s not all they do, though. They cover the whole range, really, do reliable pregnancy tests, give advice and counselling, physical exams, arrange for abortions or put you in touch with adoption agencies, social services, whatever. They take care of everything. And they’re very discreet. One of my friends at work told me about them. Why, do you think it’s important?”

“I don’t know,” said Annie. But the one thing she did know was that abortion was a red flag for a number of fringe groups, and that people who worked at such clinics had been killed before. “Do you have the address?”

“In my room. I’ll get it for you when I get Melanie’s.”

“Fine,” said Annie. “So how did the two of you meet? You said Jennifer worked in administration.”

“Yes, she ran the business side of things. We got talking in the office while I was filling out the paperwork, that’s all. She was explaining it to me, how the system worked, that sort of thing. We just sort of hit it off. We’re about the same age and I think she felt a bit sorry for me. Anyway, it turned out I wasn’t pregnant, and she asked me if I fancied a drink to celebrate. When we got talking we found out that neither of us was happy living where we were, so we decided to pool our resources and share. We didn’t know each other well, but we got along all right.”

“Where did she live before?”

“Out Hammersmith way. She said it was a really tiny flat and the area wasn’t very nice. She didn’t like walking there by herself at night. Can I have another glass of water please?”

Annie wondered why she was asking, why she just didn’t go and get it herself. It was
her
flat, after all. Shock probably. The poor girl looked as if she was likely to faint again at any moment. Annie went over to the sink and filled the two glasses. A fat bluebottle had got itself stuck on the flypaper and was pushing frantically with its legs, trying to get away, only succeeding in miring itself deeper in the sticky stuff with each new effort it made. Annie thought she knew what that felt like.

“Where did you live then?” she asked, handing over the water.

“Thank you. In Richmond. With my parents.”

“Why did you leave? Was it because you thought you were pregnant?”

“Oh, no. It wasn’t anything to do with that. I never even told them. And the boy…well, he’s long gone now. Richmond is just too far out. I was spending all my time commuting. I work in Clapham. I’m a librarian. It’s only a couple of tube stops, and on a nice day I can walk if I’ve got enough time.”

“I see,” said Annie. “Why do you think Jennifer was so secretive about this new boyfriend?”

“If you ask me,” Kate said, lowering her voice, “I think he’s married.”

That made sense, Annie thought. Jennifer probably wouldn’t have bragged about a relationship with a married man. The fear of discovery was likely to make her nervous, on edge, and maybe the mobile was the safest way to communicate. No chance of getting his wife on the other end. “But you have no idea what his name is or where he lives?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“How did they meet?”

“I don’t even know if I’m right about any of it,” said Kate. “My mother always said I have too much imagination for my own good.”

“Guess. Where
might
Jennifer have met someone? What kind of places did she like to go? Nightclubs?”

“No, I’ve already told you she wasn’t like that. Besides, she was usually too tired when she got back from work. She often worked late at the centre. I mean she’d go for a drink or a meal with friends from work now and then, and maybe the two of us would go to the pictures once in a while. Then there was her friend Melanie.”

“Could it have been someone she met at work?”

“It might have been. That’s the most likely place, isn’t it?”

Annie nodded. She knew that. Work was where she had met Banks and, in a way, Phil Keane. “Why wasn’t she out with him on Friday? It’s the weekend, after all. People usually get together.”

“I don’t know,” said Kate. “She just said she was stopping in. She did say she was expecting a phone call at some time, but she didn’t know exactly when.” Her face started twitching again as if she was about to cry. “Should I have known? Should I have stopped her?”

Annie went over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Calm down, Kate,” she said. “There’s nothing you could have done, no way you could have known.”

“But I feel so useless. Some friend I’ve turned out to be.”

“It’s not your fault. The best thing you can do is try to answer my questions as clearly and calmly as possible. Okay?”

Kate nodded but continued to sniffle and dab at her eyes and nose.

“This phone call came between half past ten and a quarter to eleven?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“What about Jennifer’s family?” Annie asked. “Where do they live? Did she get along with them?”

“Fine, as far as I know,” said Kate. “I mean, she didn’t visit them that often, but they live in Shrewsbury. You don’t when they’re so far away, do you?”

“No,” said Annie, whose father lived even farther away, in St. Ives. “Can you find their address for me, too? Now that we know it is Jennifer’s body we found, someone will have to let them know what’s happened.”

“Of course,” said Kate. “I’ve got that one in my PDA. You know, in case of emergencies or anything. I never thought I’d need it for something like this.” She dabbed at her eyes again, fetched her shoulder bag and gave Annie the address.

Annie stood up. “And now,” she said, “can I have a look at Jennifer’s room, while you dig out those other addresses?”

5

B
anks left his car parked in Corinne’s street, only a short walk from Roy’s, took the District Line from Earl’s Court to Embankment and walked up to the main post office behind Trafalgar Square. There he bought a padded envelope and posted both CD copies – Roy’s business files from the USB drive and the sex images – to himself at Western Area Headquarters. It was always a good idea, he thought, to have backup, preferably stored in a different location. He kept the original CD of JPEGs and the USB drive in his briefcase along with the papers Corinne had printed out for him.

After he had finished at the post office, he dropped in at the first newsagent’s he saw and bought another packet of Silk Cut. While he was paying he noticed one of the headlines in the evening paper and looked closer. A young woman, as yet unidentified, had been found shot dead in a car outside Eastvale, North Yorkshire. No doubt if he’d been on duty he would have caught the case, but as things were, it would be Annie’s. He didn’t envy her having to deal with the media feeding frenzy guns always caused, but perhaps Gristhorpe would take care of the press, the way he usually did.

Banks lit a cigarette and started to walk. He had often done so when he worked on the Met, and sometimes it helped him sort out his feelings or solve a problem. Whether it did or not, he always enjoyed walking around the West End at night, no matter how much it had changed in character since his early days on the beat.

Outside the pubs, knots of people stood clutching pint glasses, laughing and joking. In Leicester Square, jugglers and fire-eaters entertained the crowds of American tourists in shorts and T-shirts who milled around drinking water from plastic bottles.

It was a sultry evening and the square was bustling with people, long queues for the Odeon, metal barriers up, some premiere or other and everyone hoping to catch a glimpse of a star. Banks remembered doing crowd duty there once as a young PC in the early seventies. One of the Bond films,
The Man With the Golden Gun
, he thought. But that had been a cold night, not far off Christmas, as he recalled, he and his fellow PCs linking arms to keep back the onlookers as flashbulbs popped (and they were flashbulbs back then) and the stars stepped out of their limos. He thought he saw Roger Moore and Britt Ekland, but he could have been wrong; he never was much of a celebrity spotter.

Banks had loved going to the cinema back then. He and Sandra must have gone twice a week before the kids, if he was on the right shift, and sometimes if he was on evenings or nights, they’d go to a matinee. Even after Brian was born they got a neighbour to babysit now and then, until undercover work made it too difficult for him.

These days, he hardly ever went at all. The last few times he’d been to see a film, there always seemed to be someone talking,
and the place was sickly with the smell of hot buttered popcorn, the floors sticky with spilled Coke. It wasn’t so much like going to the cinema any more as it was like hanging out in a café where they showed moving pictures on the wall. There was a new multiplex in Eastvale, an extension of the Swainsdale Centre, but he hadn’t been yet and probably never would.

Banks made his way into Soho. It was going on for nine now, still daylight, but the sun was low, the light fading, and he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since that wretched curry round the corner from Roy’s place. Here the streets were just as crowded, outdoor tables at the restaurants and cafés on Old Compton Street, Greek Street, Dean Street, Frith Street overflowing. A whiff of marijuana drifted on the air, mingling with espresso, roasting garlic, olive oil and Middle Eastern spices. Neons and candlelight took on an unnatural glow in the purple twilight, smudged a little by the faint, lingering heat haze. Boys held hands as they walked down the street, or stood on street corners, leaning in towards one another. Beautiful young women in cool, flimsy clothing walked together laughing or hung on the arms of their dates.

Banks made it to Tottenham Court Road before the electronics shops closed and after little deliberation bought a laptop with a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. It was light enough to carry easily in a compartment of his briefcase, and it would do everything he needed it to do and more. It also didn’t break his bank account, still bolstered by the insurance money from the fire. He took out the manual and various extra bits and pieces, put them in his briefcase, too, and left the packaging in the shop, After that, feeling hungry, he headed back to Soho.

On Dean Street, Banks found a restaurant he had eaten at once before, with Annie, and had enjoyed. Like all the others, the outside tables were crowded and the frontage was fully
open to the street. Nevertheless, Banks persevered inside and was rewarded with a tiny table in a corner, away from the street and the noise. It was no doubt the least desirable table in the house as far as most people were concerned, but it suited Banks perfectly. It was just as hot inside as out, so location made no difference as far as that was concerned, and a waitress came over almost immediately with the menu. She even smiled at him.

Banks mopped his brow with the serviette and studied the options. The print was small and he reached for his cheap, non-prescription reading glasses. He had found himself relying on them for reading the papers and doing crosswords more often lately.

It didn’t take him long to settle on steak, done medium, chips and a half-bottle of Château Musar. He sipped his first glass of wine while he was waiting for his meal and the rich, complex flavour was every bit as powerful as he remembered it. Annie had liked it, too.

Annie
. What was he going to do about her? Why had he been behaving like such a bastard after what she had done for him? She was seriously pissed off at him, he knew, but surely if he really tried…maybe he could break through the barrier of her anger. Truth be told, things had been shaky between them ever since they broke up. He had been jealous of Annie’s relationships, and he knew that she was jealous of his. That was partly what had made his curt dismissal of her in the hospital so unforgivable. But the circumstances had been exceptional, he told himself. He had not been in his right mind.

His steak and chips arrived and Banks turned his thoughts back to Roy. With any luck, he would turn up
something
from the computer stuff – why would Roy hide it otherwise? – a name, a company, something that would send him in the right
direction. The problem was that he would more likely than not turn up
too
much, and Banks didn’t have a slew of DCs to send out on the streets to filter out the red herrings. Perhaps he could go back and enlist more of Corinne’s help. She had said she would be willing.

For a moment, a shadow of concern for Corinne passed over him with a chill, and he shivered. Had he brought her danger along with Roy’s business secrets? But he was sure he hadn’t been followed to her house, nor was there anyone on his tail now. She would be all right, he assured himself. He would ring her first thing in the morning, just to make sure.

He had only once had dinner with Roy, he realized as he bit into the juicy fillet. They saw one another in passing at family gatherings, of course, though there had been few enough of those over the years, and Banks had been at Roy’s first wedding, but as far as the two of them sitting down to dinner together, there was only the one occasion, and the invitation had come out of the blue, for no particular reason that Banks could gather.

It was in the mid-eighties, when the financial world was reeling under the shock of insider trading scandals. Whatever he was now, Roy had been a stockbroker then, and in his Armani suit, with his hundred-quid haircut, he looked every inch the successful businessman, apple of his mother’s eye. Banks had been a mess, much as he was now, he thought, aware of the irony. Approaching burnout in London, career and marriage held together by threads, he was waiting to hear if his application for a transfer to North Yorkshire had been approved when Roy rang him one day at the office – he wasn’t even sure his brother knew where he lived at that time – and asked him if he was free for dinner at The Ivy.

The restaurant was packed with entertainment people and Banks thought he recognized a star or two, but he couldn’t put
names to faces. They had certainly looked and acted as if they were stars. After a half hour of family chat and polite inquiries into Banks’s career and well-being over a very expensive shepherd’s pie and an even more expensive bottle of Burgundy, Roy had steered the conversation towards the recent scandals. Nothing was said overtly, but Banks went away with the impression that Roy had been pumping him. Not that he knew anything, but his brother had expressed interest in the way such investigations were done, how the police gathered information, what they thought of informers, exactly where the law stood on the issue, and so on. It was done very well, and it continued over the frozen berries and white chocolate sauce he had had for dessert, but it was definitely a fishing expedition.

There was another thing, too. Banks couldn’t be certain, but he had been around drugs enough to recognize the signs, and he was sure Roy was high. Coke, he suspected. After all, that was the drug of choice back then among successful young men about town. At one point in the evening Roy excused himself to go to the toilet and came back slightly flushed and even more animated, sniffing every now and then.

And that, Banks realized, was probably when he first started thinking of his brother as a possible criminal. Before that he had merely been the annoying little brother, the paragon against which Banks was matched and found wanting. Even now, when Banks looked back on their conversation that evening, he still thought he was right, that Roy had been up to something and wanted to run down the odds on his getting caught. Well, he hadn’t got caught, and now it seemed he had moved on to other things. But were they more honest?

Banks poured the last of the Château Musar into his glass. Maybe he should have ordered a whole bottle, he thought. But that was too much, and he wanted to keep a reasonably clear
head for tomorrow. From what he could see through the clustered diners in the dim light, the street outside was even busier. The crowd was mostly young and they’d probably be drinking and clubbing until the early hours.

Over coffee and cognac, Banks realized that he had nowhere to stay. He had forgotten to book a hotel room. Then he felt the pressure of the keys and the mobile in his pocket and he knew that he had decided where he was staying the minute he had pocketed them and left Roy’s house. It was useless trying to get a taxi at this hour in the maze of Soho streets, so he walked up to Charing Cross Road, where he picked one up in no time and asked the driver to take him to South Kensington.

Winsome had been patiently ringing Banks’s parents and children on and off for most of the afternoon and early evening without any luck. When it came to Banks’s friends, she was at a loss to know who they were. He had left an old address book in his drawer, but there weren’t many entries, and some were so old the numbers were no longer in service. It felt odd, searching for her boss, poring over the personal address book of someone she called sir and looked up to, but there was no doubt that he might be able to answer a few questions. Winsome also realized that he might be in danger. After all, a woman apparently on her way to see him had been shot, and his half-renovated cottage had been broken into. Coincidence? Winsome didn’t think so.

Consulting the list of family phone numbers, Winsome had first called the daughter, Tracy, in Leeds. When she had finally got through to her around teatime, Tracy said she had no idea where her father was. The son, Brian, wasn’t answering his
mobile, so she left a message. When she phoned Banks’s parents for the third time, early in the evening, a woman answered.

“Mrs. Banks?” Winsome said.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“My name’s DC Jackman. I work with your son, DCI Banks. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all afternoon.”

“Sorry, love, we’ve been to visit my brother and his wife in Ely. Why? What’s wrong? Has something happened to Alan?”