Strange Affair (15 page)

Banks had a couple of hours to kill before his meeting with Burgess. First he called Julian Harwood and was surprised to get an appointment to meet at Starbucks on Old Brompton Road at two o’clock that afternoon. Harwood sounded like the kind of person who thought giving you the time of day was doing you a big favour, but the mention that Banks was Roy’s brother got his interest.

After that, he had made a written note of the names and numbers in Roy’s call list and mobile phone book, just in case. In his experience, electronic gadgets tended to behave erratically just when you most needed them to do what they were designed for.

Many of the names on the list matched those in the book, and he found Julian, Rupert and Corinne among them. Others were businesses mentioned in the files Corinne had copied, and then there were services, such as hairdresser, tailor, bank manager, dentist and doctor. None of it told him very much.
He rang a few of the numbers, including Rupert’s, but nobody knew where Roy was – at least, no one admitted to knowing where he was.

A woman called Jenn figured quite prominently in the last thirty calls – at least ten of them were to or from her – and Banks guessed she was Corinne’s replacement. He tried ringing the number but it was unavailable. He wondered if there was any other way he could get in touch with her. The odds were that if she had nothing to do with Roy’s disappearance, she would ring his mobile before too long.

As Banks glanced through the stack of memos and accounts, looked at all the company logos and names, he felt frustration set in. None of them meant anything to him, and he didn’t have the time or the resources to check them all out. He had no access to the Police National Computer, for a start. He could be looking at the names of dozens of criminals and not even know it. Burgess might help, but he would only tell Banks what he wanted him to know.

Banks spent half an hour having another look around the house and found nothing more of interest. Then he settled down to examine the JPEG files on the CD he had found yesterday. He sat his new laptop computer on the kitchen table, brewed himself some coffee and managed to follow the instructions and get the machine going. He slipped in the CD and found Windows Explorer tucked away at the bottom of the Accessories menu.

His computer automatically displayed the 1,232 JPEG files as thumbnails. Banks scrolled through these, all images of naked women with file names like Maya, Teresa, April, Mia and Kimmie, or of men and women engaged in sex acts. If he rested his cursor on one of them, information about file
dimension, type and size would appear in a little box. Most of the JPEG images were between twenty-five and seventy-five kilobytes in size.

When he got to the 980th image, however, Banks noticed that it and the next two were different: all three were numbered with the prefix “DSC” and showed two men sitting together at what looked to be an outdoor café. When he let his cursor rest on one of them, he found that, at 650 kilobytes, it was considerably larger than the earlier images, and that it was taken on Tuesday the eighth of June at 3:15 p.m. by a camera identified as E4300. Roy’s Nikon was a 4300 model. According to the “details” view, the other images were all downloaded the next day, so it looked as if Roy had dragged them in from another folder.

Intrigued, Banks double-clicked on the first image of the two men. He didn’t recognize either of them. They were leaning towards one another, in earnest conversation. Both wore white open-necked shirts and light, casual trousers. One was bulkier with curly greying hair, the other younger and thinner with spiky black hair, a goatee and a hunted, watchful expression on his face, as if he were worried about being spied upon.

The following two images were of the same scene, taken in rapid succession. Banks scrolled to the end of the folder, but all he found were more Larissas, Natashas, Nadias and Mitzis.

On Tuesday afternoon, then, Roy had taken three candid photographs of two men in conversation at an outdoor café, and on Wednesday he had burned them on a CD, hidden among hundreds of erotic images. He had then placed the CD in the Blue Lamps jewel case, which stood out like a sore thumb in his music collection.

So who were the men and what, if anything, did they have to do with Roy’s disappearance? Banks picked up the laptop and took it upstairs. It was time to learn how to use Roy’s printer.

DC Kevin Templeton thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he reported to Gristhorpe that morning and the boss said to take Winsome with him and pay Mr. Roger Cropley an early visit. The credit card companies were not exactly forthcoming when it came to providing information, even to the police, but the service centre’s CCTV cameras showed a number plate beginning with YF, which was the Leeds licensing office. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency offices were closed on Sundays, so Templeton had had to resort to the local telephone directories and electoral rolls. As luck would have it, the name eventually yielded a north Eastvale address, which also meant that Mr. Cropley would, in all likelihood, have taken the same road off the A1 as Jennifer Clewes.

Templeton let Winsome drive the short distance to Cropley’s, sneaking surreptitious glances at the taut black fabric stretched over her thighs whenever she changed gear. Christ, they could kill a man, he thought with wonder. Then he realized he was randy that morning because he hadn’t shagged the red-headed clerk last night, the way he had intended. She had given him a nasty look, too, when he got to work that morning, one of those looks that said you’ve had your chance, mate, now on your bike. Still, he knew he could break down her resistance again given the opportunity. He was also tired, he realized, not having slept for more than an hour or so, but that he could deal with.

As the empty Sunday morning streets flashed by, he put his head in detective gear and planned out his interview. He liked Cropley for the killing. There were one or two small glitches, but nothing he couldn’t reason his way past: No sexual interference, for a start, which was a bit of a puzzle, and no struggle, either. Then there was Banks’s address in the victim’s pocket. But Templeton was sure Cropley had pulled her over and tried it on and something had gone disastrously wrong.

“How was your Saturday night?” he asked Winsome.

She gave him a sideways glance. “Fine. And yours?”

“You already know about mine, spent sampling the delights of motorway cuisine. What did you get up to, then?”

“Up to?? Nothing special. Club social.”

“Club?”

“Yeah, the potholing club.”

Templeton knew that Winsome liked to climb down holes in the ground and explore underground caverns. He couldn’t think of anything more boring, or, for that matter, more terrifying, given that he suffered from claustrophobia. “Where d’you hold it?” he asked. “Gaping Gill?”

“Very funny,” said Winsome. “Actually we met in the Cock and Bull. You should come along sometime.”

Was she asking him out? “The Cock and Bull?”

“No, idiot. Potholing.”

“No way,” said Templeton. “You’ll not get me down one of those black holes.”

“Coward,” she said. “Here we are.”

She pulled up in front of a neat Georgian semi, an unremarkable house with mullioned windows and beige stone cladding. The street was on a low rise and offered a magnificent view out west to lower Swainsdale. There was a small limestone
church with a square Norman tower at the end of the street, and people were already filing in for the morning service.

Templeton jabbed at the doorbell, Winsome beside him. Despite, or perhaps because of, his lack of sleep, Templeton felt pepped up, excited, like the one time he had taken ecstasy at a club. Winsome seemed cheerful enough in that cool and graceful way she had, and if she had noticed him glancing at her thighs in the car, she hadn’t said anything.

The man who answered the door didn’t look particularly like a pervert as far as Templeton could tell, except that he was wearing sandals with white socks, but he did match the description Ali had given him at Watford Gap. About forty, with thinning sandy hair, slim but with a beer belly sagging over his worn brown corduroy trousers, he had a long face with pouch-like cheeks and a rather hangdog expression. He reminded Templeton a bit of that actor who seemed to be in all the old sitcom repeats on telly with Judi Dench and Penelope Keith.

“Mr. Cropley?” said Templeton, showing his warrant card. “We’re police officers. We’d like a word, if we may.”

Cropley looked puzzled the way they all did when the police came calling. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, moving aside. “Please, come in. My wife’s just…” He let the sentence trail, and Templeton and Winsome followed him into a living room that smelled of cinnamon and apples, where Mrs. Cropley was putting the finishing touches to a colourful flower arrangement. She was taller than her husband, and bony, with strong, almost masculine, features. She looked a bit severe to Templeton, and he could well imagine her cracking out the leathers and whip for an evening S&M session. The thought made him shudder inside. And maybe it drove Mr. Cropley to other things.

“It’s your husband we want to talk to,” Templeton said, smiling. “First off, at any rate.”

Mrs. Cropley stood there for a moment before the penny dropped. When it did, she gave her husband a look, then turned and left the room without a word.

Templeton tried to read significance into that look. There was something there, no doubt about it. One of Cropley’s dirty little secrets had come back to haunt him, and his wife knew what it was, was letting him know that she knew, and he was on his own.

“We were just going to get ready for church,” said Cropley.

“I’m afraid the vicar will have to manage without you this morning,” said Templeton.

“What’s it about?”

“I think you know. First of all, were you driving up the M1 and the A1 late Friday evening?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What make of car do you drive?”

“A Honda.”

“Colour?”

“Dark green.”

“Did you stop at the Watford Gap services?”

“Yes. Look, I –”

“While you were there, did you notice a young woman alone?”

“There were a lot of people there. I…”

Templeton caught Winsome flashing him a glance. She knew. Cropley was evading the question, the first sign of guilt.

“I’ll ask you again,” Templeton went on. “Did you see a young woman there in the café alone. Nice figure, reddish hair. She’d be hard to miss.”

“I can’t remember.”

Templeton made a show of consulting his notebook. “Thing is,” he went on, “the bloke behind the counter remembers you sitting opposite the girl, and the petrol station attendant remembers you filling up at the same time this young woman was there. That’s how we found out your name, from the credit card slip. So we know you were there. Do you remember seeing a young woman at the garage? She was driving a light blue Peugeot 106. Think about it. Take your time.”

“Why? What –”

“Do you remember her?”

“Perhaps,” said Cropley. “Vaguely. But I can’t say I was paying much attention.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Then you heard wrong.”

“Come off it,” said Templeton. “You were leering at her, weren’t you? The attendant said you looked as if you wanted to stick your nozzle in her tank. You fancied her, didn’t you? Wanted a piece.” He was aware of Winsome looking askance at him, but sometimes a direct shock to the system worked better than any amount of gentle questioning.

Cropley reddened. “That’s not how it happened at all.”

“Not how what happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened. The situation, that’s all. I might have noticed her, but I wasn’t ‘leering’ as you put it. I’m a married man, a God-fearing man.”

“That doesn’t always stop people.”

“Besides, since when has leering been against the law?”

“So you were leering at her.”

“Don’t put words into my mouth.”

“What were you doing on the road so late?”

“Coming home. That’s not a crime, either, is it? I work in London. I usually spend the week there.”

“A commuter, then. What do you do?”

“Computers. Software development.”

“Are you usually that late coming home?”

“It varies. As a rule, I try to get away by midafternoon on a Friday to beat the traffic, or early evening at the latest.”

“What was different about last Friday?”

“There was a meeting. We had a deadline to meet on an important project.”

“And if I called your company they’d verify this?”

“Of course. Why would I lie?”

“For all I know,” said Templeton, “you drive up and down the motorway looking for young girls to rape and kill.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? Do you read the papers? Watch the news?”

“I try to keep abreast of current affairs.”

“Oh, you do, do you? Well, I don’t suppose you’ve been following the story about the young woman murdered on the road from the A1 to Eastvale, have you? The same road you took. You were following her, weren’t you? Waiting for your opportunity. A dark country lane. You cut her off. What happened next? Wasn’t she your type after all? Did she struggle? Why did you shoot her?”