Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery) (27 page)

‘Travelled much?’ Banks asked, to break the tension that seemed to stretch between them like a taut elastic band.

‘I’ve never really been anywhere before. Well, I tell a lie. I did go to Barcelona once, and I’ve been to Italy, of course. But that was family, so it doesn’t really count.’

‘Your husband?’

Joanna nodded and twisted her wedding ring.

Sensing that she didn’t want to linger on the topic, Banks moved quickly on. ‘I’d suggest you do a bit of sightseeing, enjoy yourself. Did you bring your camera?’

‘No.’

‘You should have. You can probably buy a cheap one in any tourist shop.’

‘I’ll be too busy working. What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I just don’t think you’ll have a lot to do, that’s all. I’ve got two murders to investigate now, three if you include Rachel Hewitt, and I work better alone, without interference. I don’t need someone watching my every move, looking over my shoulder. Also, no foreign cop or prosecutor is going to talk to you. I’ll be lucky if they talk to me with you present.’

‘I—’

‘You’re Professional Standards. You do what you do.’

‘Can we clear the air a bit?’ Joanna said. ‘Why are you being so nasty to me? You don’t have a reputation as a particularly mean person, so why pick on me? I’m not here to investigate you. Is your ego so big you can’t get over that? I’ve been trying to work with you for six days, and if you’re not actively against me, you avoid me, you shut me out. You play silly practical jokes, and now you expect me to go off sightseeing while you do the real man’s work. You didn’t want me with you yesterday to interview Merike Noormets. You didn’t want me to come with you today to Tallinn. You ignored me throughout the entire journey here. You were surly all the way from the airport. What is it with you?’ She paused and gave him a level gaze.

‘It’s just that I can’t imagine what there is for you to do here, that’s all. Say we find the girl, say she admits she drugged Quinn and put him in a position to be blackmailed. So what? What does that prove? It certainly doesn’t prove he was bent, working for Corrigan or anyone else. To find out about that you’d need to be back in England. There’s nothing for you here is what I’m saying. I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re not. You like to humiliate me and make me feel small. Fine. Go ahead if it makes you feel good. If it helps you to think I’ve got no feelings, that I’m just some sort of robotic persecutor of good honest cops. As a matter of fact, I do have feelings. If you prick me, I bleed. All right?’

‘All right,’ said Banks. ‘I mean it. I’m sorry. All I’m really saying is that I work better alone.’

The food arrived, and they paused to take a few bites before continuing their conversation. The turbot was good, Banks thought.

‘Well, I’m sorry, too,’ said Joanna eventually, ‘but you’re not alone on this one. The point is that I do the job I do, but it doesn’t define me. I am not my job. And I’m not made of stone. I meant it. You can be very hurtful, you know. Very cruel. That’s not in your file.’

‘Yet.’

‘See what I mean? The sarcasm. It’s nasty. Mean.’

It was what Winsome had said and, if truth be told, what Banks himself had felt. He didn’t know why he did it, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. He felt guilty and foolish now, but he saw Joanna in a new light. She was nobody’s fool. She said her job didn’t define her, and she was right. This was a living breathing person, with feelings, as she had made abundantly clear. But he still couldn’t forget that she was Professional Standards and, as such, represented a stumbling block to any success he might hope to have.

Joanna glanced around the restaurant, almost as if to check that no one was listening. Nobody was paying them any attention now, as far as Banks could tell. ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret,’ she said.

Annie and Winsome were skirting the southern edges of Leeds on the M62 towards the Drighlington exit. The Hewitts had agreed to see them that afternoon, intrigued by what little Annie had told them on the phone. ‘Poor people,’ Winsome had said. ‘I didn’t intend for them to get their hopes up. But they’ll grasp at any straw they think might help them find their daughter alive.’ And it was true. Pathetic, really, the little tremor of excitement in Maureen Hewitt’s voice the moment Annie mentioned she was from the police and wanted to talk about Rachel. If she were in Mrs Hewitt’s shoes, would she accept that her missing daughter was dead after six years? Would she
hope
that she was? Probably not, she realised. When you give up hope, what do you have left? At least if someone found Rachel’s body, her parents would
know
, would be able to bury her and move on with their lives, however painfully and slowly. Closure.

‘We’re almost there,’ said Annie, checking the signs. ‘Next exit. Get in the lane.’

Winsome edged the Toyota into the exit lane and turned off the motorway towards a large roundabout.

‘Not far now,’ Annie said.

She had read up as much as she could on Rachel Hewitt that morning. Nobody had done a psychological profile of the victim, but Bill Quinn had put together a thumbnail character sketch that described her as an intelligent girl, but given to occasional wild flights of fancy and impulsive behaviour, a social drinker, a loyal friend, a person who cared for other people and wanted to make the world a better place. Reading that last bit had made Annie feel like putting her finger down her throat and gagging. It sounded like one of those speeches candidates for Miss World or whatever beauty pageant contestants spout in their skimpy swimming costumes. World peace, save the children, the seals and the whales, feed the hungry and all that. But there was a hint of a dark side. Rachel was also a dreamer and something of a material girl. She harboured a fantasy of meeting her Prince Charming one day, but he would have to be rich. It was a common, and possibly dangerous, blend of naïveté and avarice.

Naturally, Quinn had been thorough in his investigation of Rachel’s friends and contacts. She could have been targeted for trafficking. Though she didn’t seem to fit the usual victim profile, it was a possibility no good copper would fail to check out. A foreign boyfriend woos her, swears undying love, and arranges to meet up with her in Tallinn, where they live blissfully together until he reveals his true self and tells her what she has to do to help repay his debts. What she
will
do, if she really loves him. Then the beatings, the rapes, the mental and physical abuse begin, the brainwashing. It happened all too often. But not, apparently, to Rachel. There were no foreign boyfriends in her life, no suspicious characters, no one who didn’t check out cleanly. It seemed she had lived an exemplary life with exemplary friends before Tallinn swallowed her up.

They found the house, a compact redbrick semi in a street of compact redbrick semis. There was nothing about it to distinguish it from the rest, no poster of Rachel in the front window or sign in the garden, only a beat-up old Astra in the drive, and a lawn that needed a bit of loving care. It was tragic in its ordinariness.

Annie rang the bell and the door was answered almost immediately by a woman she took to be Maureen Hewitt. She was about fifty, Annie guessed, rather on the tall, gaunt side, with a long face and fair hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore no make-up, but her complexion was good, though pale, as if she didn’t go outdoors very much. There was an unnatural, brittle brightness in her pale blue eyes that Annie found disconcerting. Someone who lived for hope, no matter what reality presented her with.

She led them to the front room, where her husband was sitting in an armchair.

‘It’s the detectives who rang earlier,’ she said.

Mr Hewitt got up and shook hands with Winsome and Annie. ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps . . . some tea before we begin?’

For some reason Annie couldn’t quite work out, Mr Hewitt reminded her of a vicar – not quite grounded, but with a certain aura of authority, weight of sorrow and sense of purpose. He went and made the tea, and when it was done, Mrs Hewitt suggested they go into the ‘office’ as they were dealing with ‘official Rachel business’.

The office was in the spare bedroom, and this large room was the real heart and nerve centre of the operation, Annie felt as soon as she walked in, the mug of tea warm in her hand. In an odd way, the Hewitts seemed somehow more relaxed in the office than they had in their living room. Two of the walls were taken up by desks and office equipment. There were two computers, a fax machine, a photocopier, a couple of laser printers, two telephones, filing cabinets, and even a television tuned to a twenty-four-hour BBC world news channel that was on mute. Though the room was generally clean and tidy, there were piles of papers around, many of them flyers with Rachel’s picture and a plea for help, in various languages. Framed photos of Rachel lined the walls, from one of her in her mother’s arms shortly after she’d been born, to the slightly glamorous studio shot in her teens. She had a half smile on her face, lips slightly parted, and the diffuse, fuzzy lighting you get on glamour shots highlighted her spun-gold hair and her blemishless porcelain skin. Her features were delicate, finely chiselled, but not sharp or pinched, and her cheekbones were high. She looked a bit Nordic, Annie thought, and also a bit like a doll. Fragile, too. But there was more, beyond all that. The intelligent eyes, the serious girl behind the smile. The girl who cared, who wanted to do some good in the world, who wanted to be rich.

‘This is our operations centre,’ said Mr Hewitt, who asked them to call him Luke and his wife Maureen. ‘Please, sit down.’

In addition to the office-style chairs in front of the desks, there were a couple of small armchairs in the centre of the room, no doubt kept for interviewers and visitors just like Annie and Winsome.

‘You said on the phone you had some news,’ said Maureen Hewitt, hovering over them keenly.

‘Well, it’s not really news,’ said Annie. ‘But we do have a few questions for you. First of all, have you heard about Bill Quinn?’

‘Inspector Quinn,’ said Maureen. ‘Oh, yes. Isn’t it terrible? And he was so good to us.’

‘You knew him well?’

‘I wouldn’t say well, would you, Luke? But we knew him.’

‘Even after the investigation?’

‘We sent him bulletins, let him know what we were doing to keep Rachel’s name in the public eye. That’s all.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Let me think. It was shortly after his wife died, wasn’t it, Luke?’

Luke agreed. ‘About a month ago,’ he said. ‘Late March.’

‘What did he come to see you about?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ said Luke. ‘It was a bit of a puzzle really. Why he came. We hadn’t actually
seen
him for years. Not since he got back from Tallinn six years ago, in fact. He told us what had happened to his wife, of course, and we offered him our condolences, naturally. He was very upset. He said he envied us our strength and belief.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Well, I told him it hadn’t been easy. My wife and I are regular churchgoers, and we’ve had a lot of support from the parish, of course, but sometimes even faith . . .’ He shook his head. ‘There’ve been times when . . . Anyway, you don’t want to know about that. You know, a lot of people think we’re just keeping up a front, putting on some sort of a show, that we should long ago have let go and moved on.’

‘What do you think?’ Annie asked.

‘As long as there’s a chance that our darling Rachel is still alive, then we’ll carry on trying to find her,’ said Maureen. She picked up one of the flyers and handed it to Annie. ‘Look at this. Latvian. We had a sighting near Riga just last week.’

‘There must be a lot of sightings.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Maureen.

‘Fewer and fewer as time goes by,’ said Luke. ‘The hardest thing is to get anyone to take them seriously and follow up. That’s why it’s so important to keep her face out there, keep her name on peoples’ lips. We have to keep up the pressure, make sure nobody forgets. No offence, but we can’t depend on the police. You have other cases, other things to occupy your time. Rachel is all we have. It’s up to us to try to keep the investigation going at some level. People think we’re publicity seekers. Well, we are. But the publicity is for Rachel, not for us.’

‘We try to stay on good terms with the media,’ said Maureen, ‘but it’s difficult sometimes. They can be very intrusive, as you know, if you’ve been reading the papers and watching TV lately. They’re your best friend and helper one minute, then they turn on you the next. We’ve tried being as polite and informative as we can, but then they turned on us for being too cool and unemotional, not being passionate and anguished enough, for not crying all the time. Honestly, sometimes you just can’t win.’

Annie had read the stories in the papers about their recent testimony in the hacking inquiry, about how an unscrupulous reporter had hacked into their private telephones and hounded their remaining daughter, Heather, stealing her diary. At one point, this same reporter had even ‘borrowed’ Maureen’s journal and reproduced sections of it in the newspaper, her deepest fears about her missing daughter, a breakdown of communication with her other daughter, her feelings of despair and thoughts of suicide. It had been headline news – MOTHER OF MISSING GIRL ON SUICIDE WATCH – but then so had their evidence against the reporter and his editor later, at the official inquiry.