The Price of Love and Other Stories (9 page)

Whitman laughed. “All right, you’ve got me. Or you think you’ve got me. We’ll see about that when my solicitor gets here. But don’t assume Victor Vancalm was the innocent in all this. How do you think we met in the first place?”

“Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Even PC Plod could figure that one out,” Whitman went on. He was clearly enjoying his new-found sense of superiority, and Banks was not going to disabuse him of the notion.

“You’ll have to be a bit clearer than that,” he said.

“I don’t think I’d be incriminating myself if I told you that Victor Vancalm was an aficionado of the kind of thing you mentioned earlier.”

“You mean Vancalm was into child pornography?”

Whitman sighed. “It looks as if I do have to spell it out for you. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. That was how we met in the first place. A shared interest in a special kind of love.” He folded his arms again. “And you won’t get another word out of me until my solicitor arrives. This time I mean it.”

Banks nodded. He didn’t really need another word from Colin Whitman. Not just yet, at any rate.

—

“Have you found anything out yet, Mr. Banks?” asked Denise Vancalm.

They were sitting in the same room they had sat in two days ago, at Banks’s request, though the police hadn’t quite finished with the house yet and Mrs. Vancalm was still staying at the Jedburgh Hotel. When Banks suggested the house as a venue, she had readily agreed, as she said she had some more clothes she wanted to pick up. DI Annie Cabbot was there too, notebook open, pen in hand.

“Quite a bit,” said Banks. “Mr. Whitman is under arrest.”

“Colin? My God. Did Colin … I mean, I can’t believe it. Why?”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Vancalm. Colin Whitman didn’t kill your husband.”

“Then I don’t understand.” She clutched at the gold pendant around her neck. “Why? Who?”

“You killed your husband,” Banks said.

“Me?” She pointed at her chest. “But that’s absurd. I was at the poker circle. You know I was.”

“You told me that was where you were.”

“But Natasha, Gabriella, Evangeline, Heather … They all corroborated my story.”

“Indeed they did,” said Banks. “And that caused me no end of problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just couldn’t think at first what would make four law-abiding professional women alibi a friend for the murder of her husband. It didn’t make sense. In almost every scenario I could think of, someone would have spoken out against it, suggested another course of action, refused to be involved.”

“Of course,” said Denise Vancalm. “That’s why it’s
true
.”

Banks shook his head. “No, it’s not. I said I couldn’t think of anything, and at first I couldn’t. Perhaps spousal abuse came close, but even then there was certain to be a voice of reason, a dissenting voice. And there were no hints that your husband abused
you
. Maybe if he
were a serial killer … but that clearly wasn’t the case either. Only when Mr. Whitman told me the truth did I understand it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. Your husband was a child pornographer. All these trips. Amsterdam. Berlin. Brussels. Oh, he did business, of course, but then there was the
other
business, wasn’t there? The secret meetings, the swaps, the children, often smuggled in from eastern Europe, bought and paid for.”

“This is absurd. I want my solicitor.”

“All in good time,” said Banks, who was getting sick and tired of hearing that request. “Somehow,” he went on, “you found out about it. Perhaps he let something slip on the computer, or maybe it was something else, but you found out. You were shocked, horrified, of course. You didn’t know what to do. Horror turned to disgust. It sickened you. You had to do something about it, but you didn’t know what. All you knew was that you couldn’t go on living with a man like that, and that he couldn’t be allowed to keep on doing what he was doing. Am I right so far?”

Denise Vancalm said nothing, but her expression spoke volumes. “Do go on, Chief Inspector,” she said softly. “It’s a fascinating story.”

“No doubt your first thought, as an honest citizen, was to report him to the authorities. But you couldn’t do that, could you?”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I think there were two reasons. First, you couldn’t live with it, with the shame of knowing who, or what, you had been married to for fifteen years. It would have been an admission of weakness, of defeat.”

“Very good,” said Denise. “And the other reason?”

“Professional. Your business is important to you. You couldn’t afford for your husband to go on trial for what he did. You’re a fund -raiser and event organizer for charities, predominantly
children’s
charities. Imagine how it would go down with your colleagues that you were married to a child pornographer and you didn’t even
know it. Oh, there would be sympathy enough at first. Poor Denise, they’d say. But there’d always be those important little questions at the backs of their minds.
Did
she know? How could she
not
have known? Why did it take her so long to turn him in? It would have meant the end for you. You couldn’t have lived with both that
and
with your own personal shame. But the widow of a murder victim? A burglary gone wrong? There, you get all the sympathy without the vexing questions.
As long as you have a watertight alibi.
And with Gabriella Mountjoy, Natasha Goldwell, Evangeline White and Heather Murchison all swearing you were with them all evening, the old surprising-a-burglar routine should have worked very well.”

“But how could I have done it?”

“Very easily. After you got to Gabriella’s, you left your car there. There’s nothing much more distinctive than a red sports car, and you didn’t want anyone to see that around your home that evening. You borrowed one of the others’ cars, probably Evangeline White’s. She wasn’t particularly a
Top Gear
type. All she wanted was a nice little runner that would get her from A to B. Nondescript. You drove back home shortly before your husband was due to arrive and parked out of the way. You broke in through the side window to make it look as if a burglar had gained entry, and then you waited for him. I don’t know if there was any discussion when he arrived, any questioning, any chance to offer an explanation, or whether you simply executed the sentence the moment he walked into his study.”

“All this is very clever,” Denise said, “but it assumes you have evidence that my husband was what you say he was, and that I knew about it.”

“Friends can only be relied on up to a point,” said Banks. “Natasha Goldwell values her freedom, and when she found it under threat, she decided that it might be best to make a clean breast of things. It doesn’t get her off without punishment completely, of course, but I think we can be confident that a judge will view her with a certain
amount of lenience. And of course, once Natasha decided to tell the truth, it didn’t take the others long to follow.”

Pale and trembling, Denise Vancalm reached into her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. “And what did Natasha have to say?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“That not only did she and the others provide you with an alibi, because they were as horrified as you were about your husband’s activities, but that she went over to your house the day before. That’s when she cleaned off your husband’s computer. She’s good at it. It’s her job: computer software design, specializing in security. Our experts found traces when she told them where to look. Not a lot, but enough to show what was there and to give us a few more leads to chase down. And they’re still working on it. You also cleaned out the safe. No doubt there were discs and photographs there too.”

“It was the computer,” Denise said, her voice no more than a whisper.

“What?” said Banks.

“The computer. Victor was away in Berlin and my web service was on the blink. We have different services. Sounds silly, I know, but there it is. Different businesses, different providers. He wasn’t aware of it, but I’d known his password for ages. I saw him type it in once, the keys he used. I have a good visual memory. Anyway, I wasn’t prying. Not at first. I just wanted to look up a company online. When I started Internet Explorer, I accidentally caused a list of the last few sites he’d visited to drop down. Some of them sounded odd. I visited them out of curiosity. I’m sure you know what it’s like. Well, let’s say I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the security, the passwords and what have you. Then I checked his email browser and found a few dodgy messages. Oh, there were no photographs of naked children or anything like that, and they were clearly using some sort of code, but it was pretty obvious what the sender was referring to. At first, I thought it might have been some sick sort of spam, but I checked
his other folders. There were more. Some were from people we’d socialized with. Business colleagues. It sickened me. There were … pictures too. I didn’t find those until Natasha came. They were well hidden, secured.”

“Is that why you smashed the computer screen?”

“Yes. I wasn’t thinking. I just lashed out.”

“He took a tremendous risk in keeping them.”

“Don’t they all? But he needed them. Obviously, the compulsion overcomes all the risks. Maybe it’s even a part of the excitement, the possibility of being caught. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“So you decided to kill him?”

She nodded and sighed. “You’re right. What’s the point in lying anymore? I don’t blame Natasha. She was never really comfortable with the plan from the start. She was appalled by what she saw on the screen, of course, and she went along with it, but of all of them, she had the most reservations. As I say, I don’t blame her. If I could only have come up with some other way … ”

“You could have reported him.”

“No. You were right about that. And there would have been a trial. Victor wouldn’t have given up without a fight. I couldn’t have stood that. Everyone knowing.”

The irony, Banks thought, was that, even now it had come out and Denise Vancalm would certainly go to trial, she would probably get more public sympathy as the murderess of a child pornographer than she would have got as the wife of a live one. As for her alibi, the Eastvale Ladies’ Poker Circle, Banks didn’t know what would happen. Their fate lay in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts, not in his, thank God. As he and Annie walked Denise Vancalm out to the waiting police car, Banks found himself thinking that they would probably not have to look very far to find a poker game in prison.

T
he strangers came to live on the island at the beginning of summer 1969, and by the end of August my best friend, Mary Jane, was dead. The townsfolk blamed the Newcomers and their heathen ways, but I was certain it was something else. Not something new, but something old and powerful that had festered in these parts for years, or perhaps had always been here.

I remember the morning the Newcomers arrived. We were all in chapel. It was stifling hot because the windows were closed, and there was no air conditioning. “Stop fidgeting and listen to the Preacher,” hissed Mother. I tried my best, but his words made no sense to me. Flecks of spittle flew from his mouth like when water touches hot oil in a griddle. Something about Judgment Day, when the dead would rise incorruptible.

Next to me, Mary Jane was looking down at her shoes, trying to hold back her laughter. I could see the muscles tightening around her lips and jaw. If we started giggling now, we were done for. The Preacher didn’t like laughter. It made him angry. He finally gave her one of his laser-like looks, and that seemed to settle her down. He’d never liked Mary Jane ever since she refused to attend his special instruction evening classes. She told me that when he had asked her,
he had put his face so close to hers that she had been able to smell the bourbon on his breath, and she was sure she had seen the outline of his thing pushing hard against his pants. She also said she had seen him touching Betsy Goodall where he shouldn’t have been touching her, but when we asked Betsy, she blushed and denied everything. What else could she have done? Who would have believed her? In those days, as perhaps even now, small, isolated communities like ours kept their nasty little secrets to themselves.

Across the aisle, Riley McCorkindale kept glancing sideways at Mary Jane when he thought she couldn’t see him. Riley was sweet on her, but she gave him a terrible runaround. I thought he was quite nice, but he
was
very shy, and he seemed far too young for us, no matter how tall and strong he was. Besides, he was always chewing gum, and we thought that looked common. We were very sophisticated young ladies. And you have to understand that Mary Jane was very beautiful, not gawky and plain like me, with lustrous dark hair hanging over her shoulders and the biggest, bluest eyes you have ever seen.

At last the service ended and we ran out into the summer sunshine. Our parents lingered to shake hands with neighbours and talk to the Preacher, of course. They were old enough to know that you weren’t supposed to seem in too much of a hurry to leave God’s house. But Mary Jane and I were only fifteen, sophisticated as we were, and everybody knew that meant trouble. Especially when they said we were too old for our own good or too big for our boots. “Precocious” was the word they used most often to describe us. I looked it up and felt quite flattered. I didn’t like it when I heard Mrs. Hammond in the general store call us “brazen hussies” when she thought I couldn’t hear her. That wasn’t fair.

It was that day after chapel when we noticed the Newcomers. I think Mary Jane saw them first, because I remember seeing her expression change from laughter to wonder as I followed her gaze to an old school bus pulling into the parking lot. It wasn’t yellow but was
painted all colours, great swirls and blobs and sunbursts of green, red, purple, orange, black, and blue, like nothing we’d ever seen before. And the people! We didn’t own a television set in our house – the Preacher was against them and Mother was devout – but I’d seen pictures of people like them in magazines that tourists left on the ferry sometimes, and I’d even read in Father’s newspaper about how they took drugs, listened to strange, distorted loud music, and held large gatherings outside the cities, where they indulged in unspeakable practices. But I had never seen any of them in the flesh before.