Strange Affair (9 page)

“Nothing that I could see. He seemed much the same as ever. Except…”

“Yes?”

“Well, as I said, little things, things a woman notices. Forgetfulness, distance, distraction. That wasn’t like him.”

“But he wasn’t depressed or worried about anything?”

“Not that you’d know. I just thought he had someone else on his mind and he’d rather be with her.”

“What about drugs?” Banks asked.

“What about them?”

“Come off it. Don’t tell me you and Roy never snorted a line, smoked a spliff.”

“So what if we did?”

“Apart from it being illegal, which we’ll ignore for the moment, when you get into the drug world you get to meet some nasty people. Did Roy owe his dealer money, for example?”

“Look, it wasn’t much. Just recreational. A gram on the weekends, that sort of thing. Nothing more than he can easily afford.”

“All right,” said Banks. “How much do you know about his business dealings?”

“A fair bit.”

“You’re his accountant, right?”

“Roy takes care of his own books.”

“Oh. I thought that was how you met?”

“Well, yes,” said Corinne. “He got audited and a friend recommended me to him.” She twirled her Celtic cross. “Most of my clients are in the entertainment business – writers, musicians, artists – nobody really big league, but a few decent, steady earners. Roy was a bit different, to say the least, but I needed the money. And before you ask, everything was above-board.” She narrowed her eyes. “Roy once told me he was sure you thought he was a crook.”

“I don’t think he’s a crook,” Banks said, not being entirely truthful. “I think maybe he stretches the law a bit, finds the odd loophole, that’s all. Plenty of businessmen do. What I’m wondering, though, is whether he had any reason to run off. Was his business in trouble? Had he lost a lot of money, made some errors in judgement?”

“No. Roy’s books were good enough for me and the taxman.”

“Look, I’ve seen his house,” said Banks. “The Porsche, the plasma TV, the gadgets. Roy obviously makes quite a lot of money somehow. You said he makes it legitimately. Have you any idea how?”

“He’s a financier. He still plays the stock market to some extent, but mostly he finances business ventures.”

“What kinds?”

“All kinds. Lately he’s been specializing in technology and private health care.”

“Here?”

“All over the place. Sometimes he gets involved in French or German operations. He has connections in Brussels, the EU, and in Zurich and Geneva. He also spends a lot of time and energy in America. He loves New York. Roy’s no fool. He knows better than to put all his eggs in one basket. That’s one reason he’s been so successful.” She paused. “You don’t know your brother at all, do you?” Before Banks could answer, she went on, “He’s a remarkable man in many ways, a financier who can quote Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer at dinner. But he never forgets where he came from. The crushing poverty. He dragged himself out of it, made something of himself, and it’s what drives him. He never wants to end up like that again.”

What kind of a line had Roy been spinning Corinne? Banks wondered. Their childhood hadn’t been that bad. Admittedly, she had only seen the relatively decent house his parents lived in now, and not the back-to-back terrace behind the brick-works where they had lived until Banks was eleven and Roy six. But even then “crushing poverty” was pushing it a bit. They had always been fed and clothed and never lacked for love. Banks’s father had always been in work until the eighties. What did it matter that the toilet had been outside, down the street, and the whole family had had to share a tin bathtub, which they filled with kettles of water boiled on the gas cooker? They were no different from thousands of other working-class families in the fifties and sixties.

“It’s true we were never very close,” Banks said, slapping a fly from the knee of his trousers. “What can I say? It just happens that way sometimes. We haven’t got that much in common.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” said Corinne. “I can’t stand my younger sister. She’s a snob and a misery-guts.”

“I don’t hate Roy. I just don’t know him very well, and I’m worried he’s in some sort of trouble.” Banks remembered the CD he had found in Roy’s Blue Lamps jewel case and slipped it out of his pocket. “I found this at Roy’s,” he said. “I wonder if you could help me with it?”

“Of course.”

It didn’t take Corinne long to put the CD in her computer and bring up the list of contents. The icons were JPEGs: 1,232 of them in all. Some were merely numbered, others had names like Natasha, Kiki and Kayla. Corinne opened her image viewer and set a slide show going.

Banks was looking over her shoulder, hand resting on the back of the chair, when the images started coming up on the screen. The first showed a naked woman with a man’s erect penis in her mouth, sperm dribbling down her chin, a stoned look in her eyes; the next showed the same man entering the woman from behind, an obviously feigned look of ecstasy on her face. After that came several photos of an extremely attractive blond teenager in various stages of undress and revealing positions.

That was enough.

Corinne abruptly ended the slide show and ejected the disc. “I suppose that just goes to show that Roy isn’t much different from most men, when you get right down to it,” she said, moving away from the computer. Banks could see that her face
was red. She handed the disc back to him. “Maybe you’d like to keep this?”

“Is that all that’s on it?” he asked.

“Short of looking at all 1,232 files to make sure, I’d say that’s a pretty good guess. Of course, you’re welcome to check them all out, but not here, if you don’t mind. I find that sort of thing a bit demeaning. Not to mention insulting.”

Well, Banks thought, it had been worth a try. Though he had nothing at all against images of naked woman, either alone or with partners, Banks had seen enough of the sordid side of the porn business to know how bad it could get, especially if children were involved. From what he had seen, though, Roy’s collection looked ordinary, the girls of age, if a little on the young side. In a way, it made him feel a bit closer to Roy to find out that he was human after all, the dirty devil. If only their mother knew. But then his policeman’s mind kicked in. If Roy had taken these images himself, on a digital camera, say, rather than simply downloaded them from the Internet, then he could be involved in a sleazy business.

“Did Roy have anything to do with Internet porn?” he asked Corinne, forgetting that she might not be the best person to ask.

“Always ready to think the worst of him, aren’t you?” she said.

“I can’t see why you’re always so quick to leap to his defence after what he’s done to you.”

Corinne flushed with anger.

“Believe it or not, I’m trying to help,” said Banks.

“Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.” She looked towards the CD and made a face. “Anyway, there’s your evidence, for what it’s worth.”

Banks took the CD. At some point he would examine it more closely, study each of the 1,232 images, just to make sure. Hotel rooms and outdoor locations had been identified from background features in Internet porn. One victim of child pornography in America had been identified from a blurred-out school logo on her T-shirt. If Roy
had
taken any of these pictures, there was a chance of finding out where he had taken them, and who the models were, should it come to that. But not here, not now.

He had just about run out of questions to ask Corinne, and he could see that she had become edgy, anxious for him to leave. Whether it was the effect of the images on the CD or something else, he definitely felt that he had outstayed his welcome. But he remembered the pen-like object he had found in Roy’s office drawer. Maybe Corinne knew what it was. He took it out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her. “Any idea what this is?”

Corinne took the object from Banks, eyed it closely and removed the cap. “It’s a portable mini-USB drive. For storing information.”

“Like that CD?”

“Same idea, but not quite as much space. This one’s only got 256 megs, not 700. Handy, though. You can clip it in your inside pocket just like a pen.”

“Can we see what’s on it?”

Corinne clearly wasn’t comfortable delving into Roy’s private affairs, especially after what she had just seen on the CD. Banks had been at his job for so long that he had got used to digging deep into a person’s private life. As far as the police were concerned, there are no secrets, especially in a major investigation. He often didn’t like what he found, but he’d developed a tolerance for people’s little quirks over the years.

Most people, when you get past their facade of normality, have some sort of guilty secret, something they’ve tried to keep from the rest of the world, and Banks had come across most of them in his time, from the harmless hoarders of newspapers and magazines, whose homes were like labyrinths of tottering columns of print, to the secret cross-dressers and lonely fetishists. Of course, they were all grief-and horror-stricken, humiliated that someone had found out their little secrets, but to Banks it was nothing special.

Corinne’s reaction made him realize for the first time in a while that what he did was unnatural and invasive. In the short time he had been with her, he had as good as implied that her ex-fiancée,
his
brother, was involved in drugs, illicit sex and fraud. All in a day’s work for him, perhaps, but not for a basically nice person like Corinne. Had the job made him insensitive? Banks thought of Penny Cartwright again, and her violent reaction to his suggestion of dinner last night. Was it something to do with what he did for a living, the way he looked at the world, at people? She was a free spirit, after all, so did that make him the enemy?

Corinne plugged the USB drive into her computer. “Here we go,” she said, and Banks looked over her shoulder at the monitor.

4

S
hortly after half past six that Saturday evening, Annie walked out of the Oval tube station, where she’d been crammed in an overheated carriage with about five million people on their way home from shopping or visiting friends and relatives, and headed down Camberwell New Road, past the park on the corner. Young lads with shaved heads and bare upper bodies lounged on the grass, drinking cans of lager and flexing their tattoos, leering at every attractive woman who passed by. A group of younger kids had set up makeshift goals with their discarded T-shirts and were playing football. Just watching them made Annie sweat.

Then she saw Phil.

He was on the other side of the street, walking a dog, some sort of little terrier on a lead. But it was him, she was sure of it. The same lazy grace in his step, the casual but expensive clothes, chin up, slightly receding hairline. Hardly looking, she dashed into the road, aware of horns blaring around her, and she had almost made it across when his attention was attracted by the noise.

He paused and looked towards her, a puzzled expression on his face. Annie got to the pavement and stopped, oblivious
to the cursing of the last driver who had barely missed her. It wasn’t Phil after all, she realized. There was a superficial similarity, but that was all. The man bent to pat his dog, then with a curious backward glance, he carried on walking towards the traffic lights. Annie leaned against a lamppost until her heartbeat returned to normal, and cursed. This wasn’t the first time she thought she had seen him; she would have to be more careful in future, less jumpy. If she were to be realistic about it, she had to realize that bumping into him in a street in London was the last thing that was likely to happen.

She was still wired from the train journey. She would have to calm down. She had just made the 3:25, and had managed to find a seat in the quiet car, but no matter how many windows had been open, it had still been too hot. And she had been thinking about Phil, which was probably why her mind had fooled her into thinking she had actually seen him across the street. Throughout most of the journey she had read the tabloids, scouring the pages for any whiff of him, but had found nothing, as usual. She had to get a grip on herself.

Despite the rule of quiet, more than one mobile rang during the journey, and Annie could also hear the overspill from someone’s personal headphones. It had made her think of Banks, and again she started wondering where the hell he was and what he had to do with Jennifer Clewes’s murder. According to the woman with the baby, Banks had left under his own steam that morning, but none of this explained what the hell was going on.

Annie found the house just off Lothian Road. The two DCs assigned to watch the flat were still sitting in the kitchen, the man with his feet on the table, shirtsleeves rolled up, chewing on a matchstick and reading through a pile of letters, and the woman sipping tea as she flipped through a stack of
Hello!
magazines. Two tipped cigarette butts lay crushed in a Royal Doulton saucer. Somehow, both detectives managed to look like naughty schoolkids caught in the act, though neither showed any trace of guilt. Annie introduced herself.

“And how are things in the frozen north?” asked the man, whose name was Sharpe, keeping his feet firmly on the kitchen table and the matchstick in the corner of his mouth. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved in about four days.

“Hot,” said Annie. “What are you doing?”

Sharpe gestured to the letters. “Just nosing about a bit. Afraid there’s nothing very interesting, just bills, junk mail and bank statements, all pretty much as you’d expect. No really juicy stuff. People don’t write letters the way they used to, do they? It’s all e-mail and texting these days, in’ it?”

Considering that Sharpe looked about twenty-one, it was odd to hear him being so critical of “these days,” as they were probably the only days he knew. But the irony in his tone wasn’t lost on Annie, and the callous disregard which both of them seemed to display towards the victim’s home angered her. “Okay, thanks for keeping an eye out,” she said. “You can leave now.”

Sharpe looked at his partner, Handy, and raised an eyebrow. The match in the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re not our guv,” he said.

Annie sighed. “Fine,” she said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. My patience is already running a bit thin.” She took out her mobile, went into the hallway and phoned DI Brooke at Kennington station. After a few pleasantries and the promise of a drink together later that evening, Annie explained the situation briefly, then went back into the kitchen, smiled at Sharpe and handed him the phone.

The moment he put it to his ear, his feet shot off the table and he sat bolt upright in his chair, almost swallowing his
matchstick. His partner, who hadn’t said a word so far, frowned at him. When the call was over, Sharpe dropped the mobile on the table, scowled at Annie, then turned to his partner and said, “Come on, Jackie, we’ve got to go.” He made a show of swaggering as slowly as possible out of the house, which Annie thought would have been funny if it weren’t so pathetic, and with one mean, backward glance mouthed the word “bitch” and stuck his middle finger in the air.

Annie felt inordinately satisfied when that little scene was over, and she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. It was lukewarm, but she couldn’t be bothered to make a fresh pot. One of the DCs had opened a window, but it was no use; there was no breeze to bring relief. An empty strand of flypaper twisted in what little air current there was over the sink.

While she was waiting, Annie took out her mobile and rang Gristhorpe in Eastvale. Dr. Glendenning had finished the post-mortem on Jennifer Clewes and had found nothing other than the gunshot wound. Her stomach contents consisted of a partially digested ham and tomato sandwich, eaten at least two hours before death, which bore out Templeton’s theory that she had driven up from London and probably stopped at a roadside café on the way. Glendenning wouldn’t commit himself to time of death, except to narrow it down to between one and four in the morning. The SOCOs were still working the scene and would get around to examining Banks’s cottage as soon as they could. They had found a partial print on the driver’s door of Jennifer Clewes’s car, but it didn’t match any they had on file.

As it turned out, Annie didn’t have long to wait for Jennifer’s flatmate. At about seven o’clock, the front door opened and she heard a woman’s voice call out. “Jenn? Hello, Jenn? Are you back yet?”

When the owner of the voice walked into the kitchen and saw Annie she stopped dead in her tracks, put her hand to her chest and backed away. “What is it?” she asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Annie took out her warrant card and walked over to her. The young woman studied it.

“North Yorkshire?” she said. “I don’t understand. You broke into our house. How did you do that? I didn’t see any damage to the lock.”

“We’ve got keys for all occasions,” said Annie.

“What do you want with me?”

“Are you Kate Nesbit, Jennifer Clewes’s flatmate?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Maybe you’d better sit down,” said Annie, pulling out a chair at the table.

Kate was still dazed as she lowered herself into the chair. Her eyes lighted on the saucer and her nostrils twitched. “Who’s been smoking? We don’t allow smoking in the flat.”

Annie cursed herself for not getting rid of the butts, though their smell still lingered in the warm air.

“It wasn’t me,” she said, putting the saucer on the draining-board. She didn’t know where the waste bin was.

“You mean someone else has been here?”

Annie lingered by the sink. “Just two detectives from your local station. I had words with them. I’m sorry they were so rude. It was necessary to get in, believe me.”

“
Necessary
?” Kate shook her head. She was a pretty girl, in a very wholesome, no-nonsense sort of way, with her blond hair cut short, black-rimmed oval glasses and a healthy pink glow on her cheeks. She looked athletic, Annie thought, and it was easy to visualize her tall, rangy frame on horseback. Even the clothes she wore, white shorts and a green rugby-style
shirt, looked sporty. “What’s going on?” she asked. “It’s not good news, is it?”

“I’m afraid not.” Annie sat down opposite her. “Drink?”

“Not for me. Tell me what it is. It’s not Daddy, is it? It can’t be. I was just there.”

“You were visiting your parents?”

“In Richmond, yes. I go every Saturday when I’m not working.”

“No,” said Annie. “It’s not your father. Look, this might be a bit of a shock, but I need you to look at it.” She opened her briefcase and slipped out the photograph of Jennifer Clewes that Peter Darby had taken at the mortuary. It wasn’t a bad one – she looked peaceful enough and there were no signs of violence, no blood – but there was no doubt that it was a photograph of a dead person. “Is this Jennifer Clewes, your flatmate?”

Kate put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It’s Jenn. What happened to her? Did she have an accident?”

“In a way. Look, do you have any idea why she was driving up to Yorkshire late last night?”

“I didn’t know that she was.”

“Did you know she’d gone out?”

“Yes. We were home last night. I mean, we don’t live in one another’s pockets, we have our own rooms, but…My God, I don’t believe this.” She put her hands to her face. Annie could see that her whole body was shaking.

“What happened, Kate?” Annie said. “Please, try and focus for me.”

Kate took a deep breath. It seemed to help a little. “There was nothing we wanted to watch on telly, so we were just watching a DVD.
Bend It Like Beckham
. Jenn’s mobile went off and she swore. We were enjoying the film. Anyway, she went
into her bedroom to answer it and when she came back she said there was an emergency and she had to go out, to just carry on watching the film without her. She said she wasn’t sure when she would be back. Now you’re telling me she’ll never come back.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’d be about half past ten, a quarter to eleven.”

That was consistent with the timing, Annie thought. It would take about four hours to drive from Kennington to Eastvale, depending on traffic, and Jennifer Clewes had been killed between one and four o’clock in the morning about three miles shy of her destination. “Did she give you any idea about
where
she might be going?”

“None at all. Just that she had to go. Right then. But that’s just like her.”

“Oh?”

“What I mean is that she wasn’t very forthcoming about what she was doing, where she was going. Even if I needed to know when she’d be back, for meals and such. She could be very inconsiderate.” Kate put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, listen to me. How terrible.” She started crying.

“It’s all right,” said Annie, trying to comfort her. “Try to stay calm. Did Jennifer seem worried, frightened?”

“No, not exactly frightened. But she was pale, as if she’d had a shock or something.”

“Have you any idea who made the call?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“What did you do after she left?”

“Watched the rest of the film and went to bed. Look, what’s happened? Did she have a car crash? Was that it? It can’t have
been her fault. She was always a careful driver and she never drank over the limit.”

“It’s nothing like that,” said Annie.

“Then what? Please tell me.”

She’d have to find out sooner or later, Annie thought. She got up, took a couple of tumblers from the glass-fronted cupboard and filled them with tap water. She passed one to Kate and sat down again. She could hardly bear Kate’s imploring expression, the wide, fearful eyes and furrowed brow, the tumbler shaking in her hands. When Kate heard what Annie had to tell her, her life would never be the same again; it would be forever tainted, forever marked by murder.

“Jennifer was shot,” Annie said in a soft, flat voice. “I’m really sorry.”

“Shot?” Kate echoed. “No…she…But I don’t understand…”

“Neither do we, Kate. That’s what we’re trying to find out. Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her?”

“Harm Jenn? Of course not.” The words came out in gulps, as if Kate were desperate for air.

Kate put the glass down, but she missed the edge of the table. It fell to the floor and shattered. She stood up and put her hand to her mouth, then, without warning, her eyes turned up, and before Annie could reach her she crumpled in a heap on the kitchen floor.