The Price of Love and Other Stories (39 page)
“Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it, after all these years?”
“That’s what I was wondering about,” said Banks. “You’re a bit scant with the details. Why? How?”
“Well, it wasn’t down to me, if that was what you were thinking. I just got the team’s results and thought you’d want to know. It’s funny the way these cold case things work. Not my department. God knows if it’s alphabetical or by year, or whatever system they use. Anyway, the Jackie Simmons case came up for investigation. You liked her, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Banks. “I did. She was a beautiful, spirited, intelligent girl, no matter what, and she didn’t deserve what happened to her. She had her problems, but don’t we all?”
“Too true. Christ, I’ll never forget the day you went for Micallef in Gerrard Street. I thought you were going to kill him.”
Banks fingered the scar beside his right eye. “I might have done if you and Benny hadn’t stopped me,” said Banks. “Not my finest hour. Back to the cold case investigation.”
“Oh, yes. Well, anyway, one of the team got suspicious when he started checking out the personalities involved and saw Roly Verity’s name. As you might know, Verity left the Met under a bit of a cloud. Nothing proven, nothing serious, at any rate, but even so … This was in the 90s, a bit after your time. We couldn’t have known, not back in ’85.”
“How deep did it go?”
“A lot deeper than people had originally thought. He had serious gambling debts at the time of the Soho killings, and it turns out Micallef had bought some of them. We know Micallef himself had an alibi for Jackie Simmons, and so, it turns out, did Benny Fraser, his chief enforcer. The alibis could have been manufactured, of course, and there were others who could have done it, including the Chinese, but the young lad, a fresh pair of eyes and all, decided to have a closer look at Roly. The thinking was that he’d done it at Micallef’s request to get out of his debts, and from Micallef’s point of view, it put Roly in his power ever after, tied them together. They were already close enough, and this was the clincher. Of all the people involved, it turns out that Roly Verity didn’t have much of an alibi. He’d been at the celebration party with us, on and off, but remember he didn’t come on with us to the club, that was just you, me and … what was his name?”
“Burgess,” said Banks. “Dirty Dick Burgess.”
“Ah, yes. Burgess. How could I forget? I wonder what happened to him.”
“Counter-terrorism,” said Banks. “Very hush-hush.”
“I’d never have thought it,” said Albright. “Anyway, once our bright spark found out that Verity
could
have done it, he started going over the forensics. And that brought us to the DNA. You remember the lab got skin samples from under Jackie Simmons’s fingernails? She’d scratched her killer as he strangled her.”
“Will the DNA sample the Spanish took from Verity stand up?”
“The CPS says it will. All above board, agreed to, witnessed, signed for, the lot. Between you and me, he didn’t have much choice.
He didn’t know why they were doing it, but he thought his future on the Costa del Sol depended on it.”
“Well, in a way it did, didn’t it?” said Banks. “Well done. Good work, Ozzy.”
“As I said, it wasn’t me. The only fear is that he might not survive the journey. According to the Spanish authorities, his heart’s just about conked out.”
“Roly’s heart conked out years ago,” said Banks. “Anyway, Ozzy, you’re the bearer of good tidings. Thank you. We must get together sometime when I’m down your way.”
“Indeed,” said Albright. “I don’t drink now, so it’ll have to be Starbucks, I’m afraid. Oh, before I forget, I bumped into someone who said to say hello to you. Part of the cold case team, as it turns out.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. A DCI called Linda. Linda Jameson. Says she used to know you.”
Jesus Christ.
Linda.
Banks felt a jolt through his chest. He tried to keep the emotion he felt out of his voice. “Yes, I believe I knew her once,” he said. “Done well for herself, then?”
“Very. She’s head of the cold case Psychological Profiling Unit. One of the few actual cops doing the job. Went to university parttime and everything. Got all the degrees.”
“Good for her,” said Banks. “I always thought she was a bright lass.”
“Course, back then we laughed at all that stuff.”
“Not you, Ozzy,” said Banks. “You had more foresight than the lot of us put together. Look, I’d better go now. Thanks for the good news. Hope to see you soon.”
Albright said his farewells and Banks put down the phone.
Linda
. Well, he had once told her that she ought to be a psychologist or something, and now she’d gone and done it. Had he treated her badly? He didn’t think so. He remembered their last meeting at her Waterloo flat, his home away from home. She had shed a few tears,
they’d had a bit too much to drink, a long goodbye kiss, too long, really … It was all so many years ago, and they had never been in touch since. For a moment, he thought he could smell chamomile tea and hear the rustling of a silk kimono.
A coach pulled into the market square and disgorged its cargo of tourists. Banks remembered that he had been thinking about getting away for a while, just for a break, somewhere different. He reached for his phone to ring his travel agent and find out what was on offer, but before he could dial he heard a tap at his door.
“Yes?” he called.
The door opened and Annie Cabbot stepped in, looking good with her new short, layered haircut, a few highlights here and there, tight jeans and a simple mauve top. She frowned at him. “Some -thing wrong?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing. Just an old case. Brings back memories. What is it?”
“Stabbing on the East Side Estate. Are you interested, or do you want me to take Winsome?”
Banks looked out at the clear blue sky through his window, then back at Annie. He smiled. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “Memory Lane gets a bit stuffy sometimes. I could do with a breath of fresh air.”
“Cornelius Jubb.”
This story grew out of researching and writing about the Second World War in
In a Dry Season
. When Karin Slaughter came up with the idea of a series of stories linked through time by a charm bracelet, she asked me to set mine in this period, and it became the second story in
Like a Charm
. It’s really about the title character and racial injustice. By naming him Cornelius Jubb and making him a black American GI stationed in Yorkshire in the Second World War, I was able to stress both the differences and the similarities between him and the locals. He might seem strange and exotic, but he has a Yorkshire name. Naturally this perplexes the local people. I had also written a couple of stories featuring Frank Bascombe, a “Special Constable” in the war, and this was intended as a third, though I couldn’t use his name in the anthology for copyright reasons.
“The Magic of Your Touch.”
For some reason, this is one of my favourites, though I have always felt a little guilty that it was probably not quite as long as editor Robert J. Randisi had hoped for. It would be hard to see how it could be longer. This is an example of a story that really had no genesis other than the desire to sit down and write
something to do with music, as the anthology was called
Murder and All That Jazz
. I had no idea where it was going. Obviously the variation on the Faustian “deal with the devil” (Robert Johnson at the crossroads) was in my mind, as was the nature of obsession and the corrosive nature of guilt, as in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But I didn’t know any of that at the time I started writing. All I knew was that a man was wandering lost in an urban landscape that resembled something out of David Lynch’s
Eraserhead
. What he would do, what would become of him, I had no idea until several hours later when the story was finished. Another thing I like about this story is that it contains elements of horror and the supernatural that do not usually appear in my work. I have always thought that if I didn’t write crime I would write horror, so I was pleased to be able to include at least a touch of it here.
“The Eastvale Ladies’ Poker Circle.”
When Otto Penzler asked for a story connected with poker for
Dead Man’s Hand
, I balked, knowing little about the game and certainly never having won any money at it. But it’s not easy to say no to Otto. Part of the challenge was finding ways around these inadequacies, of course, and my initial research showed me that the game was quite popular with British women. It wasn’t a long stretch from that to the idea of the “poker circle,” where a group of career women get together once in a while for an evening’s fun. After that, it was the getting together that came to matter to the story, and the personalities involved, not the game of poker itself. They could have been playing cribbage for all I cared. I also got to venture into one of Eastvale’s more privileged and exclusive areas for the first time, an area that played an even bigger role in the recent Banks novel,
All the Colours of Darkness
.
“The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter.”
Though the title is a homage to the Incredible String Band’s 1968 album
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter
, the ghost of Syd Barrett haunts this story. The order, from
editors Claudia Bishop and Don Bruns, was taller than usual. Not only did they want a short story for their
Merry Band of Murderers
anthology, they also wanted a song to go with it. As it turned out, I had just finished
Piece of My Heart
, set partly in 1969, and I had invented a rock band called the Mad Hatters. It seemed to me that they could do double duty here, so I ended up writing a song by a rock band I had invented. Don Bruns set the words to music and recorded it for the CD that went with the press release for the book. The sound I wanted was a cross between Nick Drake and the late sixties pastoral mood of Pink Floyd’s
More
soundtrack and “Grantchester Meadows” from
Ummagumma
. Ethereal organ, flute and acoustic guitar. Because I was still stuck in the sixties time warp, one thing I wanted to write about was the clash between a very straight-laced traditional community and the new hippies, with their revolutionary ideas and communal living. An island in the Pacific Northwest seemed an ideal place to play this out, as it is a fairly remote and self-contained region. Originally, I was going to tell the story from Mary Jane’s viewpoint, but I soon found that Grace was a more natural storyteller. Mary Jane was a bit too flighty and would hardly have stuck to the point, but the song is about her:
Morning mist is drifting on the surface of the water
All the children are asleep except the boatman’s daughter
And Mary Jane is dreaming
Of oceans dark and gleaming,
Where she breathes the water cold,
A mermaid blessed with scales of gold,
And flows where the tide will take her.
Larks are rising from the fields and scattering the air with song.
Children dance upon the green in summer now the days are long,
But Mary Jane is dreaming
In her ocean dark and gleaming.
Kaleidoscopes of fish spin by
She hears their colours, tastes their signs
And flows where the tide will take her.
Night is day and day is night
Truth is dream and dream is right
Follow Mary Jane and see
Just what the depths can teach you.
White is black and black is white
Real is wrong and wrong is right
Follow Mary Jane and see
Just where these words can lead you.
Darkness falls upon the woods and stars are shining in the sky,
The moon floats on the water like a fallen angel, pale and dry,
But Mary Jane is dreaming
In the ocean dark and gleaming
New friends whisper in her ear
The truths she doesn’t want to hear
She flows where their words will take her.
“Walking the Dog.”
The request for this story for
Toronto Noir
reached me while I was on a cruise around South America, somewhere between Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands. I could hardly have been much farther away from Toronto, or from the sort of atmosphere I associate with noir. I must admit that, at first, the whole idea of Toronto and noir didn’t seem to work for me. I generally see noir as meaning a story about lust and greed, in which most people get exactly what they deserve and nobody cares. They are usually not stories with a “hero,” like a private eye or a cop (unless he’s a bent one), though there are some exceptions, and many people seem to use the terms
noir
and
hard-boiled
interchangeably. However
gritty and violent the Banks novels become at times, they are never noir, so it is also not the kind of style I’m used to writing.
I also think of movies more than books when I think of noir; of spare dialogue, a certain kind of lighting, the use of shadows, atmospheric music and unusual camera angles. Movies like
The Postman Always Rings Twice
,
Laura
,
Out of the Past
,
Double Indemnity
. Of course, certain authors spring to mind too: James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson. But on the whole, I find the term is overused and little understood.
Anyway, reminding myself that the whole business of writing a short story should involve exploring new territory, I agreed and set about it almost right away, asking only that I be allowed to set the tale in my own little part of Toronto, the Beaches, which is about as noir as a Yorkshire Dales village. We spent a number of days at sea travelling vast distances between ports, and I would sit every morning with my laptop, looking out over the limitless ocean ahead and tap away. I’m pleased with the story, yet it turned out not quite so much pure noir as a bit of a homage and a bit of a parody, and those with some interest in the subject may find some pleasure in spotting the book and movie references.
“Blue Christmas.”
Doug Greene from Crippen & Landru asked me for this story as a gift for friends of the publishers at Christmas 2005. It was published in a special edition of 353 copies. Doug wanted an Inspector Banks story without violence or bad language. A tall order for me! But a challenge. In the end, I came up with a Banks story without a murder, and I enjoyed writing it very much.
“Shadows on the Water.”
This one was for John Harvey’s anthology
Men from Boys
. I had been writing quite a bit about the Second World War and had even touched on the First in a story called “In Flanders Field.” When I was trying to think of something that might be a defining moment in a young man’s life, the point at which a boy
becomes a man, I thought of this childhood betrayal and of what its effects might be in later years.
“The Cherub Affair.”
This story has a long and unusual pedigree. In 1985, I took a year off teaching and decided it was make or break time as a writer. I had already become interested in crime fiction and attempted one or two novels that I quickly consigned to the basement. I wanted to write about Yorkshire, partly because of nostalgia, partly because I knew it far better than I did my new country, Canada, and partly because I liked the sort of regional English detective story that uses crime and its investigation to look at the character and foibles of a particular area of the country.
I had recently finished
A Dedicated Man
, which was with a publisher, and decided first to write a follow-up,
Gallows View
. The novels were eventually published in reverse order. After I had finished
Gallows View
, my “sabbatical” wasn’t quite over, so I began another book, this time a private eye novel set in Toronto.
I had to travel quite a long way to teach, and used to pass every day a small private investigation office above a strip mall. I could see a few dusty cabinets and stacked files through the window as the bus passed by, but I never saw who worked there. That made very fertile ground for the imagination, and so “Jones Investigations” was born, Old Jones being the grizzled old founder who was usually too drunk to investigate but passed on all he knew to his young protégé, Colin Lang, an English student with a Ph.D. who couldn’t get a teaching job and didn’t want to drive a taxi.
Around the time I finished the novel, called
Beginner’s Luck
, I heard that the Inspector Banks series – at least the first two novels – had been accepted for publication. After that, it seemed, nobody was interested in a private eye novel written by me and set in Toronto, so
Beginner’s Luck
languished in the bottom drawer of my desk. I occasionally dusted it off, and even had vague ideas for a sequel, but Banks occupied all my time, so nothing ever became of it.
When the
Toronto Star
asked for a story they could serialize over a week, I thought again of
Beginner’s Luck
. While writers might dream of turning a short story into a novel, here I was turning a novel into a short story. In the end, it was easier simply to retain the key plot elements and main characters and dump everything else – subplots, minor characters, a lot of background and exposition. I don’t think I even mention the detective’s name in the short story. It was published in seven instalments, each one with at least a minor cliff-hanger to heighten anticipation for the next. In a small way, I got to feel a bit like Charles Dickens must have felt writing his works for serialization, though I already knew how my story was going to end. I have inserted an eighth part for this edition, a scene I particularly liked in the novel but one that I wasn’t previously able to use because of length restrictions.
“The Price of Love.”
Written for a Mystery Writers of America anthology called
The Blue Religion
, edited by Michael Connelly, this story was another big challenge for me to do something different. The anthology was meant to deal with the “burden of the badge” that is a policeman’s lot, and as most of the contributors were American crime writers, I expected a high-testosterone mix of tough guys and action. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case, and the anthology is full of variety in everything except its quality. Not a bad one in the bunch. Anyway, I still wanted to shy away even from Banks and his feelings about being a cop, so I decided to use a different kind of hero and a different kind of badge.
“Birthday Dance.”
Some of the subjects for themed crime anthologies can be most challenging, and I have been involved in a number of such projects, including collections involving poker, American football, Shakespeare, and, in this one, the Bible, for Anne Perry’s
Thou Shalt Not Kill
. Well, the Bible is certainly full of murder and mayhem, but again it was a matter of avoiding the obvious, or putting
an unusual twist on something. I had recently seen Strauss’s opera
Salome
, so that story was fresh in my mind, and when I started to research its origins I found more doubt and obscurity than I did certainty, which suited me just fine. Writers thrive much better on doubt and uncertainty than on facts and self-evident truths. Nobody was even sure how old Salome was, or whether she was old enough to perform the dance of the seven veils for which she is so infamous. The idea of an innocent Salome appealed, and the story turned out as a sort of cross between a Bible story and an episode of
The Sopranos
.
“Like a Virgin.”
My publishers asked me for a new Banks story for this collection, and I wrote a novella. This is it.
